Extending the collaboration Environment for disabled
Kevin Curran
Improving Collaboration Environments for people with disabilities
First, design a Web-based teaching collaboration environment which would display relevant course material on the Web with access to an e-mail form. Also have the environment allow students to e-mail the lecturer with questions. They should also be able to browse the relevant lesson's chat room to see if their problem has been encountered by other classmates or post a question to the class. The lecturer should also be able to take control of a given student's computer, configuring settings and running programs from the luxury of the office.
- VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. Incorporate this software into the environment to help with the remote desktop part.
- Chat room applet. Run this on the local machine or maybe on a remote server. Check out Tucows to see what's available in this area.
- Use existingweb cam software for audio as well as video. ( I can let you have the existing webcam32 software. You can also borrow one of my webcams).
- Whiteboards. Tucows and other free/shareware sites have whiteboard applications that can be downloaded for free.
Main Task: Improve the above by specifically tailoring the environment to suit people with disabilities:
- Adapt audio for hard of hearing. Perhaps you can allow the viewer to specify their severity of hearing loss from a menu/button? This will then influcence the audio processing techniques used/priority etc
- Introduce additional features such as captioning etc for those with visual problems.
- Persons with physical disibilities may like larger scrolling bars/buttons etc. Have some way of ascertaining each disability and adapting in an appropriate manner.
The items above are not particulary well thought out but I just wish to give you a flavour of the direction I wish the project to proceed in.... adapting online collaborative components for persons with disability.....
To give you more background to the collaboration environment, there is a paper on the web detailing the first version of a collaboration environment that I had a number of UU students work on in the past. It was called helpmate, and an article is here at the First Monday Web site.
A good paper on the disability component to this project is titled 'GURU: A Multimedia distance-learning framework for users with disabilities' by Balasubramanian and Ventatsubramanan from the Univeristy of California and published in ACM Multimedia 2004 proceedings.
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