Re: appropriate hypertext

At 6:01 PM +0100 7/19/00, Brian Kelly wrote:
>I guess a disabled person with learning disabilities who uses a
>foot-pedal would prefer
>"Press foot pedal" rather than "Click here" or something device
>independent.  There's an opportunity for some personalisation here.

Possibly, yeah, although pressing a foot pedal could be thought of as
a "click" as much as pressing a mouse button, or "clicking" a keyboard. :)

Again, I think it is possible for us to get distracted by issues of
terminology -- bordering on "political correctness" -- instead of
on accessibility.  The foot-pedal person, once taught "this is how
you click," will easily understand what "click here for <X>" means!

>Kynn, in some of your message you mention that you're now involved in
>developing personalised Web sites.  Is this the type of thing you're
>involved in?

Yeah, what Edapta does is that we go beyond the single-presentation-
for-all-folks model (but all from the same source content!) to provide
customized user interfaces that have been personalized for a user's
specific needs.  We do this using intelligent selection and/or building
of user interfaces based on the user's capabilities and preferences
profile.

This allows for some pretty interesting stuff -- for example, for
blind users we restructure the page entirely, moving the "most important"
part (designated by the web designer) to the front of the page regardless
of where it normally is in the GUI layout, and we autogenerate an
internal "table of contents" for each page to give a sense of what's
on each page and allow for better intra-page navigation.

For users with limited dexterity (of certain types) we can restrict
the movement onscreen to a small area, so that there's no broad mouse
movements; the use of frames allows the user to actually bring the
links _to her_ rather than having to move to the links.

These types of adaptations -- or edaptations, in Edapta-speak -- let
us make improvements in usability and accessibility for _those specific
audiences_ that would simply not be possible if we were trying to
serve up only one presentation that degrades gracefully for
everyone.

>Feel free to promote your work in some detail - I've been intrigued by
>the brief mentions you've made in the past.

Hope this helps some -- email me privately if you want more details
about this.
-- 
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2000 13:13:56 UTC