sharing context in collaboration and Web documents

Many people promised material on accessibility related to collaboration and 
Web documents.

Here are some questions about sharing the context/focus and maybe there 
exists good solutions already.

How to know where the participants should look within a document? For 
instance, a presenter might go to a certain slide or point/select a piece 
of document to focus on. What kinds of tools (existing or future) would 
make it easy for the distant or other participants that don't see the 
projected document to follow the presenter? And how can the focus be 
presented by using different media?

A tool may let the user automatically follow the focus of the other 
document or give the user a list of focus points as links that can be 
followed at user's own pace. Sometimes users can see several cursor's e.g. 
in a shared drawing tool or they see one cursor that can change ownership 
when needed.

A user who does not see a cursor needs some more navigational context to 
know where to start reading and what is around the selection e.g. current 
focus is on a 3rd item in a list about different research topics in a slide 
or focus is on a sentence in the 2nd section talking about in a document 
accessibility. Also the participants need easy mechanisms for checking some 
earlier slides and then jumping back to the current one.

It would be interesting to hear what kinds of mechanisms people have used 
and what they would like to use in the future.

Marja

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 12:43:43 UTC