- From: <karl.hebenstreit@gsa.gov>
- Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 18:10:41 -0400
- To: apembert@crosslink.net
- cc: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Anne & Brian - I've been working with the Brain products (particularly the Personal Brain client) for several months, and have been in discussions with the company about addressing accessibility issues such as keyboard equivalents for web navigation and associating graphics with keywords (thoughts). Regarding the http://www.webbrain.com site, an important point to consider is that when reviewing new technologies, we (the disability community) need to evaluate the technology as independently as possible from specific implementations. In the case of Webbrain, the technology issues are 1) the scability of the product, which is providing an interface to the open source directory project with over 300,000 categories and indexing over 3 million pages, and 2) the capacity to integrate with search engine technologies. My experience with the Webbrain site performance has been positive, even when accessing the web via a modem. The initial page takes longer to load, but you can actually move through the keyword hierarchy quite rapidly, finding the most relevant keyword for your inquiry before the page even loads. Regarding the underlying technology with respect to accessibility, I believe this technology has tremendous potential for meeting needs of people with some types and degrees of cognitive disabilities, since this interface is based on an "associative computing interface" which can model the way a person thinks about a particular task, or even the world from their unique perspective. _____ I'll review the other visualization products that Brian mentioned, and bring this issue up with contacts working in the visualization area. Several of these contacts will be attending or presenting at two Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences that will be held here in the Washington, DC area in November: ASSETS 2000: http://www.acm.org/sigcaph Conference on Universal Usability: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/cuu/ Karl Hebenstreit, Jr. US General Services Administration Office of Governmentwide Policy E-mail: Karl.Hebenstreit@gsa.gov apembert@crosslink.net@w3.org on 10/25/2000 11:51:28 AM Sent by: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org To: "Brian Kelly" <b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org cc: Subject: Re: Visualisation rather than text Hi, Brian, Just checked out the webbrain.com and it will contribute nothing towards meeting the needs of those who depend on vision and graphics. The search engine was horribly slow, the links were only text, no pictures, and it took almost 10 minutes to hitting dead ends to find information on "kids" and "education" ... when found, the sites offered were useless for kids' education, but were intended only for adults and grad students or professionals. So, not only is the search engine an exercise in futility, the sites it provides aren't worth much either ... Much better results from the Altavista, Lycos and Excite! Anne On Wed, 25 Oct 2000 12:10:34 -0000 Brian Kelly <lisbk@ukoln.ac.uk> wrote: > I've recently come across Webbrain at http://www.webbrain.com/ > > This provides a 3D visualisation of search categories (it provides > a front > end to the DMoz open source directory). > > In the light of recent discussions about the need for visualisation > in > certain areas and for certain categories of users, I wondered how > this > fitted in. > > The Windows (or Mac) desktop is another example of a graphical > metaphor. > > A colleague of mine came across these other visualisation products > -- the > demos are site-specific rather than web-wide. > > from Inxight: > http://www.inxight.com/products_wb/table_lens_web/tl_web_demos.html > Table Lens > > http://www.inxight.com/products_wb/ht_server/ht_server_demos.html > Hyperbolic Tree (also see their own site map) > > from Plumb Design: > http://www.plumbdesign.com/projects/thinkmap.html > about Thinkmap > > http://millennium.sonymusic.com/ > example on Sony site (clues: the expand "button" in the lower right > corner > is a toggle, the horizonal text line that builds up to the left of > it allows > you to return to places you have been) > > http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus/ > kind of fun to play with > > Any thoughts on these types of services? > > ta > > brian > -------------------------------------------------------------- > Brian Kelly > UKOLN > University of Bath > BATH > BA2 7AY > Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk > Phone: (+44) 1225 323943 > Anne Pemberton apembert@crosslink.net
Received on Wednesday, 25 October 2000 18:10:12 UTC