- From: T. V. Raman <tvraman@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 08:20:27 -0800
- To: www-multimodal@w3.org, www-multimodal@w3.org]@bubbles.almaden.ibm.com
- Cc: Deborah Dahl <dahl@conversational-technologies.com>
Steve -- I was pointed at your question cited below, and here is a somewhat belated response. In the past, new technologies have often boltedn on accessibility after the fact, and as a result it's good to ask the question at this early stage "what about users with disabilities". The good news is that in many of the use cases motivating multimodal interaction, you're talking about users who are "differently able" from their usual mode of interaction, and a necessary consequence of this is that a lot of the edge cases that normally get ignored with respect to suers with special needs automatically get covered. Here is a concrete example: Consider a multimodal application deployed to a hand-held that meets the requirement that modalities be used to supplement one another in the interaction. For this app to be usable where one or other modality might disappear, it has to be sufficiently robust to be able to handle the case where the user cannot see the display i.e., a functionally blind user. Desktop systems in the past have introduced access issues because they covered a single user profile; multimodal devices will need to cover a lot more. In summary, rather than looking for a disabilities specific use case, we need to be thinking of how someone with different needs and abilities might participate in *each one* of the use cases --and this is the kind of discussion you should be driving within the WAI working groups. In short, ask not which use case is specific to the disabled user, --since that only marginalizes users with special needs. From: www-multimodal-request@w3.org [mailto:www-multimodal-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Steven McCaffrey Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 11:30 AM To: www-multimodal@w3.org Subject: multimodal interaction use cases: disabilities included? Hello: Disability advocacy hat, (not a job title but a fair description of some of what I do) and as a blind person: I did not see use cases with people with disabilities explicitly mentioned. Are they implicitly covered? Is it possible, for example to say something like "Computer, change to no sight mode for input and output."? All the cases seem to imply the user has all modes available, it's only the device or situation that temporarily excludes thhis or that mode of interaction. Did I read this correctly? Programmer hat: A fascinating sketch of near future web technologies with many interesting problems to work on. Thanks, Steve Steve McCaffrey Senior Programmer/Analyst Information Technology Services New York State Department of Education -- Best Regards, --raman ------------------------------------------------------------ T. V. Raman: PhD (Cornell University) IBM Research: Human Language Technologies Architect: Conversational And Multimodal WWW Standards Phone: 1 (408) 927 2608 T-Line 457-2608 Fax: 1 (408) 927 3012 Cell: 1 650 799 5724 Email: tvraman@us.ibm.com WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman AIM: TVRaman PGP: http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman.asc Snail: IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road San Jose 95120
Received on Friday, 20 December 2002 11:23:19 UTC