Personalised interfaces (was Re: appropriate hypertext)

Hi Kynn
   Thanks for the reply.
   I gave a brief talk at a WAI meeting held in Toronto after the WWW8
conference on the need for metadata to provide personalised interfaces
which could have accesibility benefits.   (Unfortunately my talk didn't
go as I'd intended, due, I think, to cultural differences in
interpreting the term "filtering").
   Anyway my slides (Powerpoint and derived HTML formats) are at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/accessibility/metadata/www8/
   In one of the slides (slide 11) I said:

Is "universal design" a false goal? Shouldn't we we aiming for
personalised services based on individual preferences?

I was arguing against the notion of HTML as a basis for universal design
and saying that be should be going for XML, and generating (possibility
personalised) XHTML from this richer resource.

Is this what you're involved in doing?

Isn't there a contradiction between this view and the universal design
argument which is perceived as using HTML as the basis?

Interested in your views.

Thanks

Brian


> >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 13:30:14 UTC