Re: suggestions for Prompting of Real-time/live authored content

Hi Heather,

I've taken the ideas I was working on for real-time authoring added
added them to your. Thoughts?


Special Case: Prompting of real-time/live authored content

When authoring tools produce real-time/live content, the luxury of
prompting on a user configurable schedule is lost to a large degree. In
addition, authors in real-time/live environments tend to be less
receptive to intrusive alerts and prompts.

There are several factors that must be taken into account in order to
address prompting in real-time authoring:

1. Determining Need: If a real-time/live communication takes place
between individuals with no special communicative needs, there may be no
need for real-time prompting (but see Archiving, below). However, the
author may not personally know all the special communicative needs of
the participants (even if the author knows everyone personally). The
tool might be able to facilitate a decision about providing supplements
by asking participants which types of supplemental material they wish to
have made available and then prompt the author (or see Assistant Author,
below) to provide these (preferably during Preparation Time, below).
When it is not possible to know the needs of everyone participating in a
communication, the tool should assume there are unidentified users with
disabilities.

2. Archiving: Even if there are no individuals with special
communicative needs participating in the original real-time/live
communication, if the communication is archived, the potential for
accessibility problems increases. Therefore, the authoring tool may
include an option that allows the author to run through the original
communication without interruption and then, once the communication is
finished, take the author through an intrusive prompting process to
check for and repair accessibility problems prior to archiving.

3. Assistant Author: In some cases it may be possible to designate a
secondary author in the live community, who can receive and respond to
the intrusive prompts for supplemental information generated as the
primary author proceeds uninterrupted. The secondary author might be an
unrelated specialist, analgous to Sign language interpreter, or a
co-author (helpful for describing technical drawings, etc.).

4. Preparation Time: If the authoring tool allows the author time to
pre-assemble materials for a live presentation (e.g. a professor
preparing for an online class), this authoring is not considered
real-time authoring. The authoring tool has the opportunity to provide
both intrusive and unintrusive prompts and alerts as described elsewhere
in this document. For example, when the professor imports an image to be
used in her lecture, she could be prompted to provide an alternative
representation of that image.

In the end, if the author must provide real-time/live supplements, but
has no preparation time or Assistant Author, then the authoring tool can
facilitate the inclusion of supplements by:
-Providing previously used supplements as defaults (see ATAG 3.5)
-Providing voice recognition of author speech input.
-@@[what else?]@@
-allowing the author to choose the types of prompts (intrusive or
unintrusive) that they would like to receive.



/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Jan Richards
UI Design Specialist
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
University of Toronto

jan.richards@utoronto.ca
Phone: (416) 946-7060
Fax: (416) 971-2896

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Received on Sunday, 24 March 2002 11:48:08 UTC