SIGACCESS NEWSLETTER A regular publication of ACM SIGACCESS: Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing Report on ASSETS 2014 Inside this Issue Sri Kurniawan and John Richards p.3 Report on ASSETS 2014 by S. Overall, the conference was a great Kurniawan and J. Richards success. ASSETS 2014 had the highest p.6 Blind Drawing: Investigation into number of registered participants with 165 screen location tracking for computer attendees. As always, it was a welcome aided interactive drawing by S. sight to see many people with disabilities Fernando participate as attendees and speakers. p.10 Draw and Drag: Accessible Touchscreen Geometry for Students Welcome to the January issue of the who are Blind by W. Grussenmeyer SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights p.14 mHealth Technologies for Self- the ACM ASSETS 2014 Conference. The first Management of Diabetes in the Older article written by the General and Program Population by S. Alexander chairs, Sri Kurniawan and John Richards, p.19 Web Searching by Individuals with respectively, provides an overview of the Cognitive Disabilities by R. Nour conference. p.26 Using Social Microvolunteering to Answer Visual Questions from Blind The Future of Accessible Users by E. Brady p.30 Developing a Chairable Computing Computing Research: ASSETS Platform to Support Power 2014 Doctoral Consortium Wheelchair Users by P. Carrington The following 9 articles describe the research p.33 Scalable Methods to Collect and work of the students who attended the Visualize Sidewalk Accessibility Data ASSETS 2014 Doctoral Consortium led by for People with Mobility Impairments Jinjuan Feng and Claude Chapdelaine. by K. Hara p.38 Performance Evaluation for Touch- Based Interaction of Older Adults by Hugo Nicolau A. Sultana Newsletter editor p.42 The Use of Concurrent Speech to Enhance Blind People’s Scanning for Relevant Information by J. Guerreiro SIGACCESS Issue 111 Newsletter January 2015 SIGACCESS Issue 111 Newsletter January 2015 About the Newsletter SIGACCESS is a special interest group of ACM on Accessible Computing. The SIGACCESS Newsletter is a regular online publication of SIGACCESS that includes content of interest to the community. To join SIGACCESS, please visit our website www.sigaccess.org SIGACCESS Officers Andrew Sears Clayton Lewis Shari Trewin Hugo Nicolau Joshua Hailpern Chair Vice-Chair Secretary Newsletter Information Treasurer Editor Director Want to see your article featured in the next issue? Contributions and inquiries can be emailed to [email protected] We encourage a wide variety of contributions, such as letters to the editor, technical papers, short reports, reviews of papers or products, abstracts, book reviews, conference reports and/or announcements, interesting web page URLs, local activity reports, and so forth. Actually, we solicit almost anything of interest to our readers and community. You may publish your work here before submitting it elsewhere. We are a very informal forum for sharing ideas with others who have common interests. Anyone interested in editing a special issue on an appropriate topic should contact the editor. As a contributing author, you retain copyright to your article and ACM will refer requests for republication directly to you. By submitting your article, you hereby grant to ACM the following non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights: to publish in print on condition of acceptance by the editor; to digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication; to include the article in the ACM Digital Library and in any Digital Library related services; to allow users to make a personal copy of the article for non-commercial, educational or research purposes. Page 2 SIGACCESS Issue 111 Newsletter January 2015 REPORT ON ASSETS 2014 Sri Kurniawan General Chair, University of California Santa Cruz [email protected] John Richards Program Chair, IBM Watson Group [email protected] The 16th ACM SIGACCESS International Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2014) was held in Rochester, New York, USA, one of America's first boomtowns that rose to prominence as the site of many flour mills located on the Genesee River. The conference was held at the Hyatt Rochester, Monday – Wednesday, October 20th - 22nd, preceded by a Doctoral Consortium on Sunday October 19th, led by Jinjuan Heidi Feng from Towson University and Claude Chapdelaine from CRIM. The conference began with a welcome by us thanking the organizing and program committee members and the reviewers. The opening session continued with the introduction of the 2014 ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computing and Accessibility by the SIGACCESS Chair Andrew Sears, followed by the presentation of the 2014 Award Recipient by Julio Abascal, the Chair of the Selection Committee. This award went to Vicki Hanson, a Distinguished Professor at RIT within the HCI and Accessibility research groups and the Chair of Inclusive Technologies at the University of Dundee, for “sustained and wide-ranging contributions including industry, academia, and policy organizations.” Julio Abascal also introduced Vicki Hanson as the keynote speaker for ASSETS 2014. Hanson’s keynote speech was entitled Computing for Humans. She discussed how the goal of supporting humans is never more evident than in the field of accessibility where we seek to create devices and software to serve people with extreme needs. In creating novel accessibility tools, research has advanced the state of the art in many areas from design of environmental spaces, to physical interfaces, to multiple software advances in computing. This was followed by our first paper session examining independent navigation by blind users and technology to reduce social isolation. (Altogether, 28 full technical papers were selected for presentation at the conference from a total of 106 submissions.) Our second paper session addressed accessibility-promoting practices and tools and was followed by our first poster and demo session. (28 posters were selected for inclusion in the conference from among 56 submissions and 18 demos were selected from among 25 submissions). We then moved to the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology for demos and a special poster session featuring the work of participants in both the Student Research Competition and the Doctoral Consortium. Day 2 began with a paper session on information access, examining efficient ways for blind users to navigate text and understand graphics. A second paper session on objects and interfaces looked at the use of 3D interfaces, the use of 3D printing in special education environments, and included the first of two TACCESS presentations. Following this, we heard presentations by this year’s Student Research Competition finalists (finalists chosen on the basis of their poster presentations the previous evening). We then conducted our SIGACCESS business meeting, heard about work in support of accessible interaction (including our second TACCESS presentation), and had our second poster and demo session. Page 3 SIGACCESS Issue 111 Newsletter January 2015 Our final day began with a look at applications and games for use by several target populations followed by a second paper session on issues of communication and website use. Our final paper session explored mobility issues and was followed by the closing session featuring announcements of the winners of the student research competition, the text entry challenge, the captioning challenge, the best paper (Tablet-Based Activity Schedule for Children with Autism in Mainstream Environment, by Charles Fage, Léonard Pommereau, Charles Consel, Émilie Balland, and Hélène Sauzéon), and the best student paper (Tactile Graphics with a voice: Using QR Codes to Access Text in Tactile Graphics, by Catherine Baker, Lauren Milne, Jeffrey Scofield, Cynthia Bennett, and Richard Ladner). This year, there were three new conference features. The first was the Text Entry Challenge, chaired by Torsten Felzer. The goals of the text entry challenge were to present an overview of current solutions to entering text through alternative means (other than keyboard) and to foster the development of practically usable systems. Ten systems were demoed during the regular poster and demo sessions, and the audience was invited to rank the systems following a set of criteria that included usability, time, and errors in inputting text. The best three systems based on audience vote were: DigitCHAT: Enabling AAC Input at Conversational Speed (by Karl Wigan and Rupal Patel), Text-Entry By Raising the Eyebrow with HaMCoS (by Torsten Felzer and Stephan Rinderknecht) and Phoneme-based Predictive Text Entry Interface (by Ha Trinh, Annalu Waller, Keith Vertanen, Per Ola Kristensson, and Vicki L. Hanson). The second new feature was the podium presentation of published TACCESS papers. TACCESS presentations allowed conference participants to hear directly from an author of work recently published in ACM’s Transactions on Accessible Computing. Two papers were presented: Automatic Task Assistance for People with Cognitive Disabilities in Brushing Teeth - a User Study with the TEBRA System (by Christian Petersen, Thomas Hermann, Sven Wachsmuth, and Jesse Hoey) and Distinguishing Users By Pointing Performance in Laboratory and Real-World Tasks (by Amy Hurst, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, and Shari Trewin). The third new feature was the use of Beam telepresence robots from Suitable Technologies to allow two remote participants to attend the talks,