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Teleworking for disabled people
- GMD's TEDIS project -
Position Paper for The Fifth International World Wide Web Conference
Workshop Web Accessibilty for People With Disabilities
Dirk Hermsdorf
German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD)
Research Group on Human-Computer Interaction (FIT.MMK)
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
e-mail: hermsdorf@gmd.de
The GMD currently intensifies its efforts to develop information and communication technologies in order to enable disabled and elderly persons to lead a self-determined life and equally participate in the social and economical activities of their community. With regard to this general objective, the TEDIS-project concentrates on telecooperation to overcome the often restricted mobility of disabled persons which is particularly detrimental to their professional integration. It is the aim to have a pilot installation of suitable teleworkstations for disabled persons.
TEDIS is a contribution to the promotional program "Telecooperation - Value Added Services" of the German Federal Department for Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF). Promotional priority topics of this program are to study new forms of telecooperation, to develop new forms of work organization required by applying telecooperation technology, and to detect possible obstructive factors.
I'm a student of computer science at the university of Bonn and a working student in TEDIS. Within the scope of this project, I'm going to write my master thesis. Its title is "Possibilities of the realization of generic HCIs (Human Computer Interfaces) and their adaptation for people with disabilities in CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) Environments". I will realize the mentioned software adaptation of a teleworkstation for disabled people. Precisely, these are the home PCs of two physically handicaped people near Dortmund. The adaptation of the teleworking station is realized in cooperation with the FTB (Forschungsinstitut Technologie-Behindertenhilfe) in Volmarstein. The two handicaped will telework for FTB during a field-trial, which has already started in April'96 and will last six month. FTB will provide some hardware adaptations like a small keyboard for the one subject who is 37 years old and suffers from a muscle atrophy and a big trackball for the other subject who is 32 and spastically handicaped. Telework will be realized with BSCW (Basic support for cooperative works), a tool for cooperative work in the Internet developed by GMD. During the field-trial we'll regualary look after the two physical handicaped adults and perform usability interviews. When the field-trial is finished, we plan to tie up more handicaped people regulary into the BSCW system for teleworking purposes.
I plan to implement the possibilty to access NCSA Mosaic completely by keyboard. A feature using the arrow keys and enter key in order to tab through the links and to select a link is already available in NCSA Mosac version 2.0. But there are more adaptations needed to reach a complete access by keyboard. This means:
Especially for physical handicaped people, this adaptation (in combination with some special hardware) will be very useful because these people in general have severe coordination problems in navigating through graphical user interfaces by input devices like a mouse. NCSA has already assured to provide the source code of Mosaic to GMD under certain conditions.
Moreover, my work will focus on a guideline to develop accessible HTML pages for people with disablities. The WWW offers a lot of possibilities for presenting information in different formats (text, audio, video, graphics). Most of theses formats don't only appear separately in a document but are intermixed. Graphical elements (graphics, buttons, icons etc.) are often tied up in a text-document and audioclips sometimes come with sound. Using this potential a document can be presented to a normal user in an impressive manner. But usually the designer doesn't pay attention to the point that e.g. mixing up a text document with graphical elements leads to at least partial inaccessibility of this document by blind users. WWW documents and WWW based applications should be designed in a way that they can be accessed by really everyone (design for all) without restricting the functionalty and the aesthetics of the document. Several HTML design guidelines have therefore been developed, including the following ones:
My aim is to develop a more comprehensive guideline that takes non-visual handicaps better into account. This guideline consists of the following components:
These components will be explained in the following paragraphs.
The software - ergonomic criteria [HHRW93, OMRK92] include demands like clearness. This means that a certain functionality of a document should always be presented in the same manner. This will simplify the access to the document for all users, but especially for handicaped users.
Generic HCI means that as far as possible for each disability there should exist a good interface to an application and to enable the exchange of data from one specific adaptation to another. In other words, the idea is to implement a layer between the user front-end and the application, which allows easy adaptation of application features to the special needs of disabled end-users.
The main idea of the general demand for the design of HTML pages is the following one: If one part of the document is presented in a format which can't or only badly can be accessed by the user, so this part must be transformed in a more usable format for the user. This leads to the question how information can be transformed from one format into another one. For example it is impossible to describe a picture exactly. It is recommended to transform at least all formats into text because text can be transmitted to everyone: people who can't read (illiterates, visual handicaped and blind people) may use one of the following assitive technologies: screen readers, braille displays or screen magnifiers. Further classifications are described within the section "special demands for certain handicaps". These further classifications will be integrated in the generic HCI. For example there should exist the possibility to choose the lettersize (big lettersize for visual handicaped people). Most of these demands can easily be followed without much expense - the designer only have to be informed about these demands.
Finally, my work will discuss the topic telework in general and their dangers and possibiltities for people with disablities use computers. Computers and especially telework offer a great chance for people with often mobility restricting disabilities. Especially for people with physical handicaps who can not access a common working-place on a regular basis telework opens a hole range of possible work-field in a section of the labour market, where not many employment possibilities exists. Anyway you always have also to be aware that especially under the circumbscribed living condition of mobility restricted disabled people, the one-sided use of computers to conect them to society may lead into social isolation Therefore, TEDIS additionaly takes care of these issues by a corresponding social technolgy assessment.
References:
[HHRW93] A. Hartmann, Th. Hermann, M. Rohde, V. Wulf, Workshop des
German Chapter
of the ACM und des Instituts für Informatik III der Universität Bonn am 20. und 21.
September 1993 in Bonn, "Menschengerechte Groupware - Software - ergonomische
Gestaltung und partizipative Umsetzung", ISBN 3-519-02683-X, B.G. Teubner, Stuttgart
[INFO95] InfoUse, Center for Accessuble Technology (CforAT),
"The User Interaction Design Guidelines Document", 28.12.1995, Version .955
[OMRK92] R. Oppermann, B. Murchner, H. Reiterer, M. Koch, Mensch
Computer
Kommunikation 5/2, Sofware - ergonomische Evaluation, Der Leitfaden EVADIS II, 2., neu
bearbeitet und erweiterte Auflage, 1992, Walter de Gruyter & Co.
[THOR93]Clas Thoren, "Nordic guidelines for computer accessibilty",
ISBN 91-86954-15-6
[TRSE95]Jutta Treviranus, Chris Serflek, University of Toronto,
"Alternative Access to the
World Wide Web"