- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 12:11:34 -0500 (EST)
- To: chasser@immerse.com (Chris Hasser)
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, bruce@immerse.com, evan@immerse.com, louis@immerse.com
to follow up on what Chris Hasser said: > Current development efforts are focused on mainstream use, but I'd like > to consider accessibility issues well in advance of product launch. Thus > this appeal for advice. I'd be grateful for input in two areas: > > 2. Suggested Strategies for the next year - people or organizations we > could collaborate with, grants we might apply for, organizations or > softare companies that might put a prototype to good use (e.g. > developing valuable software or techniques), etc. AG:: More warmup for WAI-UI: Here is a blue-sky strategic plan. We use force feedback as a pilot program to demonstrate how to do adaptation with style. The central step in this is the document-by-document or user-by-domain profiling of force feedback effect classes to interaction-plane-content classes. A simple example of this is the concept of z-index in CSS2. This is a hidden but standard layer index associated with any content that appears in the image plane of the display device. One class/class binding would be to emulate that the mouse has climbed a small curb onto a new plane whenever the z-index of what appears in that region is higher and the cursor transitions into a new region, and vice versa for emulating a teeny step down. It is not reasonable to expect the creator of every architectural drawing to think about the force-field styling of his/her drawing. Nor is it reasonable to expect the purveyors of the mouse and its support libraries to understand all domains from accounting to architecture. Achieving an intelligent binding reuquires some homework on both sides to come to a central meeting point, defined by the reference model for the binding transaction. Application domains such as architecture have data models as for example in ISO 10303 STEP. Very often these models are not carried to the level where it is clear from the model what the correct pecking order is in terms of relative importance of different boundaries. But that is what is critical in styling drawings for usability. The people who do road atlases for a living have this knowledge and consider it proprietary. But it is this pecking order that constitutes enough domain analysis so that a novel display effect such as force feedback can be bound to existing content without a case by case analysis of the document. If the content is already classified so that it is possible to detect by computation which context transitions are major and which are minor, then an application-by-rule of force feedback effects will be welcomed as a positive contribution. Otherwise a nuisance. The dream plan decentralizes the analytical work. Or at least it suggests that usability analysis of interfaces for use by people with disabilities can be boilded down to rules which guide force-feedback-effect-allocation patterns. The key thing here is that it does not make sense to decide force feedback coloration of graphical features one at a time, feature by feature. Style is achieved when there is a coordinated family of force feedback effects and the profile of their allocation to content class features makes sense as a system. Al Gilman
Received on Thursday, 12 February 1998 12:12:01 UTC