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Universal Access in the Information Society
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.431  Citation Impact (citeScore): 2 Number of Followers: 11  Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)ISSN (Print) 1615-5289 - ISSN (Online) 1615-5297 Published by Springer-Verlag  [2467 journals]
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- A multimethod synthesis of Covid-19 education research: the tightrope
between covidization and meaningfulness-
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Abstract: Abstract This study offers a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 research in education. A multi-methods approach was used to capture the full breadth of educational research. As such, a bibliometric analysis, structural topic modeling, and qualitative synthesis of top papers were combined. A total of 4,201 articles were retrieved from Scopus, mostly published from 2019 to 2021. In this work special attention is paid to analyzing and synthesizing findings about: (i) status of research about COVID-19 regarding frequencies, venues, publishing countries, (ii) identification of main topics in the COVID-19 research, and (iii) identification of the major themes in most cited articles and their impact on the educational community. Structural topic modeling identified three main groups of topics that related to education in general, moving to online education, or diverse topics (e.g., perceptions, inclusion, medical education, engagement and motivation, well-being, and equality). A deeper analysis of the papers that received most attention revealed that problem understanding was the dominating theme of papers, followed by challenges, impact, guidance, online migration, and tools and resources. A vast number of papers were produced. However, thoughtful, well-planned, and meaningful research was hard to conceptualize or implement, and a sense of urgency led to a deluge of research with thin contributions in a time of dire need to genuine insights.
PubDate: 2023-03-21
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- A study on social media and higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic
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Abstract: Abstract Nowadays social media usage has increased drastically among the stakeholders of higher educational institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly increased the surge of social media users due to the forced implementation of online pedagogy and travel restrictions. The research study presented in this paper attempted to analyze social media usage in higher education. The data were collected from primary and secondary sources with the help of leading research databases, survey questionnaires, the Delphi method, and brainstorming sessions. Statistical tools and analytic techniques incorporated in the study included bibliometric analysis, word cloud, co-occurrence network, thematic map, thematic evolution, co-word analysis, country-wise analysis along with collaboration network, statistical survey, mind mapping, and analytic hierarchy process. The study justified the aspects of social media usage in the higher educational environment. It was found that the research fraternity around the globe focused more on understanding the aspects of social media and higher education during the trying times of the Coronavirus crisis. The maximum impact of social media usage on higher education was found to be from teaching–learning and discussions, and public relations and networking. It was also found that social networking platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook (Meta), LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter were very common among the stakeholders of higher education. This study is of huge importance because it can help in paving the way to strategize remedial measures for increasing positivity and minimizing the negativity of social media usage in institutions of higher education across the world.
PubDate: 2023-03-20
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- A mobile e-learning application for enhancement of basic mathematical
skills in visually impaired children-
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Abstract: Abstract Although smartphones are equipped with accessibility functions, they still pose significant problems for visually impaired people. Sometimes these functions cannot fulfil the expectations of users. Early mobile devices had physical buttons and a keypad, and visually impaired users could navigate around the keypad using the tactile markers on the buttons. However, the lack of tactile markers makes it much more difficult to operate a touchscreen device. This paper describes an e-learning platform that is designed to improve the accessibility of smartphone applications for students who are visually impaired but have some useful vision. A User-Centered Design approach was used to develop an effective solution for visually impaired students. A study was conducted during the development of the described platform, and the results showed that our suggested design improves task completion time as compared to the initial version. Participants also expressed higher levels of satisfaction when using the improved design of this platform. The modified design was also assessed using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS), and the results indicate that it is quite reliable and rated well among visually impaired children. Furthermore, developers can use our suggested design guidelines such as clear navigation, color contrast, immediate feedback, icon arrangements, button and text size in the development of new applications.
PubDate: 2023-03-17
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- Meaningful learning: motivations of older adults in serious games
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Abstract: Abstract Social sustainability is the generation of significant behaviors through balanced levels of education, learning and awareness so that the population has a good standard of living, achieves self-improvement and supports society. This can be achieved with various strategies, one of which is learning through games, which has gained popularity in recent years due to positive results. This is effectively achieved through serious gaming, which is growing steadily, mostly in education and healthcare. This type of strategy has been typically used in young populations with a transparent interaction with technological processes that facilitate its application. However, one cannot neglect other populations such as the elderly, who may experience a technology gap and may not perceive this type of initiative in the best light. The purpose of this article is to identify the different motivations that can encourage older adults to use serious games to encourage learning processes through technology. For this purpose, different previous research on gaming experiences with older adults has been identified, from which it was possible to categorize a series of factors that motivate this population. Subsequently, we represented these factors by means of a model of motivation for the elderly and, to be able to use it, we have defined a set of heuristics based on this model. Finally, we used the heuristics by means of a questionnaire to evaluate the design of serious gaming for older adults, obtaining positive results for the use of these elements to guide the design and construction of serious games for learning in older adults.
PubDate: 2023-03-14
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- Empirical evaluation of Easy Language recommendations: a systematic
literature review from journal research in Catalan, English, and Spanish-
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Abstract: Abstract Easy Language is a language variety that aims to make information more comprehensible and, ultimately, more accessible. Content in this variety is written and designed following a set of recommendations that have been published in different guidelines. However, it remains uncertain to what extent these recommendations are backed up by empirical research. The aim of this study is to review the existing literature that evaluates current recommendations in Easy Language guidelines, on the basis of the following research questions: (a) is there empirical research that evaluates current international Easy Language recommendations' and, (b) if so, what current international Easy Language recommendations are supported by empirical research and what results were obtained' To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review based on journal articles in three languages: Catalan, English, and Spanish. First, a systematic search was designed and performed in 10 databases of different fields of science. Then, we reviewed every article that resulted from the search and found that 6 publications out of the initial 617 met the inclusion criteria and could be considered relevant for the study. Based on the data extracted from the included publications, and after an overall review of our systematic search results, we safely state that there is indeed empirical research on some current Easy Language recommendations. Nevertheless, empirical research in the field (at least in the publication format and languages considered in our study) is not enough in terms of the number of publications, and the findings obtained are far from generalisable. Our literature review suggests future lines of research, and we hope that it fosters empirical studies in the field that help support the existing findings.
PubDate: 2023-03-11
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- Understanding mindsets, skills, current practices, and barriers of
adoption of digital accessibility in Kuwait’s software development
landscape-
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Abstract: Abstract The responsibility for creating accessible software within the development of digital services is important for multiple reasons, mainly equity and inclusion. However, adopting and sustaining the development of accessible digital solutions has always been challenging, more so in countries that are relatively new to the concept of universal design, and physical and digital accessibility, and where legal sanctions are not yet established. This work investigates the technology scene in the State of Kuwait and analyses the responses of computing professionals with regard to their skills, best practices and procurement of accessible tech and to their level of awareness toward people with disabilities. The findings reveal a low level of awareness among tech professionals with regard to disabilities and digital accessibility-related standards. The findings also highlight a lack of available guidance for developing inclusive design and accessibility. Additionally, time constraints, lack of training, legal enforcement and fundamentals concepts during undergraduate and higher education contributed to observed weaknesses. Participants were keen to learn more and benefited from flyers and free professional development courses offered as incentives for survey completion.
PubDate: 2023-03-11
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- Effects of audience familiarity on anxiety in a virtual reality public
speaking training tool-
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Abstract: Abstract Public speaking is an essential skill in everyone’s professional or academic career. Nevertheless, practicing it is often not very easy; people do not always have access to a suitable environment and find others willing to listen during their rehearsals. Previous research has shown the usefulness of having a virtual audience in reducing the fear of public speaking. However, the effects of having an audience with whom the presenter is familiar are still under-explored. To help university students practice their presentations, we developed a virtual reality environment and used 3D scans of real people to create a realistic and familiar audience. We conducted a study with 10 participants to analyze whether they had different anxiety levels when presenting to familiar virtual faces compared to unfamiliar faces. Moreover, we explored whether or not the exposure to the customized virtual faces affected anxiety when the participants subsequently presented to a real-life audience. We found that people with a medium fear of speaking in public benefited the most because they felt more relaxed facing a virtual audience with familiar faces; in contrast, there were no noticeable effects for others. In addition, we examined whether anxiety could be detected through some non-traditional metrics we recorded. Results showed that we could not establish a linear correlation between the anxiety scores and our metrics, but our study suggests some underlying patterns. Finally, our findings indicate that users’ perceptions of virtual audience feedback were more concerned with the facial expressions of the virtual audience than their body language.
PubDate: 2023-03-08
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- What are tutors’ perceptions of an online tutoring project—Digital
Learning Companion—During the COVID-19 pandemic' A case study in
Taiwan-
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Abstract: The COVID-19 outbreak has had serious impact on remote education and service-learning implementation in Taiwan. To alleviate these impacts, the Digital Learning Companion, an online tutoring project, was proposed to bridge the digital divide and learning gap among remote children, while offering university students an online service-learning environment. This project recruited international students as tutors for local children. To explore tutors' perceptions of this project during the COVID-19 pandemic, qualitative research, particularly a case study, was conducted. Adopting purposive sampling, 15 participants were chosen for interviews at the end of the project, and 10 reflective videos were used to reveal further information to supplement the interview results. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data. The findings implied that using JoinNet and tutoring journals significantly facilitated the tutoring process, which led to tutors’ remarkable development in skills, social relationships, multicultural experience, altruism, social responsibility, self-efficacy, and affective values. However, they encountered some challenges, such as technical problems, communication barrier, lack of tutee information, and short tutoring duration. The solutions to these challenges and insightful suggestions for the project development are pointed out. The results of this study contribute to tutors’ cognitive, social, and motivational development, and support the online service-learning-integrated curriculum, which can become a reference for further studies regarding online service-learning implementation to bridge the research gap. Graphical abstract
PubDate: 2023-03-08
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- “Creatures of habit”: influential factors to the adoption of computer
personalization and accessibility settings-
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Abstract: Purpose: Customizing the accessibility and ease-of-use settings of a computer can improve the overall user experience for people with and without disabilities. However, the adoption of such settings remains poor. This study investigates why various factors may influence people as they personalize and when they choose to integrate those changes into everyday use. Methods: To better understand how these factors may impact people’s personalization process, we conducted a series of interviews involving 15 people with and without disabilities across several months in 2020 when computer usage became required due to the COVID-19 lockdown. We used grounded theory to analyze 49 semi-structured interviews with participants. During these interviews, people reflected upon: past attempts at personalization using built-in accessibility or ease-of-use features of their Operating System (OS) or other assistive technologies (AT), current customization activities using the personalization software, Morphic, and future opportunities for personalization systems and features. Results: We identified several barriers, facilitators, and perpetuating factors that can influence why and when people choose to adopt and integrate their personalization changes. We also outline the overall personalization lifecycle, which illustrates when various factors may impact computer personalization. Conclusion: Personalization activities are complex and easily affected by an ecosystem of influential factors that surround them. When paired with the three design considerations and ten lessons learned from this qualitative study, the overall personalization lifecycle may be useful during the design and development of future personalization systems or features for people with and without disabilities.
PubDate: 2023-03-04
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- RETRACTED ARTICLE: Mobile phone and e-government: the future for
dissemination of public services-
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PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Accessibility of university websites worldwide: a systematic literature
review-
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Abstract: Abstract The identity and institutional image of universities are presented to the world through their websites. On their websites, universities publish their academic offerings, their mission, their vision, their academic objectives, their achievements, their regulations, their news and all their university work. Hence, the importance of university websites is accessible. The accessibility of university websites has been evaluated several times in the past, but there is no work that has summarized all the evaluations performed to provide a general overview of the situation. Therefore, in this research we have performed a systematic literature review (SLR) to consolidate, analyze, synthesize and interpret the accessibility results of university websites published in 42 papers that have been selected for this study. The methodology used in this SLR was that proposed in Kitchenham’s guidelines, which includes three stages: planning the review, conducting the review and reporting the review. The results present the analysis and synthesis of the evaluations of 9,140 universities in 67 countries. Of these, 38,416 web pages, 91,421 YouTube videos and 28,395 PDF documents were evaluated. Manual methods, methods with automatic tools and the combination of both methods were used for the evaluation. Most websites were evaluated using the ISO/IEC 40500:2012 and Section 508 standards. The accessibility guidelines most commonly violated in the evaluations were: adaptable, compatible, distinguishable, input assistance, keyboard accessible, navigable, predictable, readable and text alternatives. In conclusion, the university websites, YouTube videos and PDF documents analyzed in the 42 papers present important accessibility problems. The main contribution of this SLR is the consolidation of the results of the 42 studies selected to determine the findings and trends in the accessibility of university websites around the world.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Machine translation from text to sign language: a systematic review
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Abstract: Abstract An equal opportunity for all is the basic right of every human being. The deaf society of the world needs to have access to all the information just like hearing people do. For this to happen there should be a mode of direct communication between hearing and deaf people. The need at this time is to automate this communication so as the deaf society is not dependent upon human interpreters. This paper deals with the systematic survey of conventional and state-of-the-art sign language machine translation and sign language generation projects. We used a standard procedure of carrying out a systematic literature review on 148 studies published in 30 reputed journals and 40 premium conferences and workshops. Existing literature about sign language machine translation is broadly classified into three different categories. These categories are further sub-classified into different classifications depending upon the type of machine translation. Studies pertaining to the specified classifications have been presented with their advantages and limitations. Different methods for sign language generation are reported with their benefits and limitations. Manual and automatic evaluation methods used in every study is presented along with their respective performance metrics. We call for increased efforts in presentation of signs to make them an easy and comfortable mode of communication for deaf society. There is also a requirement to improve translation methods and include the contribution of advanced technologies such as deep learning and neural networks to make an optimal translation process between text and sign language.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- A dataset for the recognition of obstacles on blind sidewalk
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Abstract: Abstract Recently, the technology of assisting the navigation of visually impaired persons with computer vision has been greatly developed. A number of scholars have conducted related research, including indoor and outdoor object detection for blind people. However, there are still problems with some existing methods or datasets. Our work mainly proposes a dataset (OD) for assisting the detection and recognition of outdoor obstacles for blind people on blind sidewalk. We classify some common obstacles, train the dataset with state-of-the-art detectors to obtain detection models, and then analyze and compare these models in detail. The results show that our proposed dataset is very challenging. The OD and the detection model can be obtained at the following URL: https://github.com/TW0521/Obstacle-Dataset.git.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Introductory programming and young learners with visual disabilities: a
review-
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Abstract: Abstract Computational Thinking (CT) captures the mental processes used to model and solve problems using a computational processes. While often connected to programming, CT is a core problem-solving skill, which has been advocated by educational researchers as a core skill, at par with reading and comprehension. A variety of learning environments have been proposed to aid young learners in acquiring knowledge of CT. The majority of such environments are highly visual, linking the process of solving a problem computationally to the process of building a graphical representation of an algorithm, e.g., in the form of a graphical jigsaw puzzle. The algorithms are often used to produce a visual output, e.g., animations. The highly visual models have been shown to be inaccessible to young learners with visual disabilities. This paper provides a review of the literature, which addresses the challenges of learning CT by young learners with visual disabilities. The survey offers also a series of recommendations on the effective design of accessible programming learning environments for young learners with visual disabilities. The paper provides an understanding of the current state of the art, along with the identification of promising directions for future research.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Interaction of visual interface and academic levels with young students’
anxiety, playfulness, and enjoyment in programming for robot control-
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Abstract: Abstract Young students’ engagement in computer programming has been recognized as a crucial issue in educational settings nowadays. In this study, a block-based programming approach was employed to investigate its impacts on the learning anxiety, playfulness, and enjoyment of young students with different academic levels. A total of 175 10th graders participated in the study. The participants were asked to use block-based programming to control a robot. The experimental results show that the block-based programming, which engages students in programming tasks using a building block-like visual interface, significantly reduced the students’ learning anxiety while also promoting their playfulness and enjoyment in the perspectives of computational thinking. It was also found that the block-based programming benefited the low- and medium-achievement more than the high-achievement students did. Therefore, it was inferred that block-based programming would be useful for those people who have worse learning performance in conventional programming learning so they need further remedial instruction. Moreover, male students had lower learning anxiety and higher playfulness than the female students. The findings could be a good reference for researchers and school teachers who intend to conduct programming activities for young children.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- An analysis of the utility of digital materials for high school students
with intellectual disability and their effects on academic success-
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Abstract: Abstract This study thoroughly examines the usability of digital materials, to establish a classroom environment in which technology is integrated into teaching practices using tablet computers and interactive smart boards. The study was conducted at a special education vocational school, where students with intellectual disability receive training. The integration of technology was made to the Natural Disasters unit (erosion, landslide, flood, earthquake, and digital story developed on the subject of flood) in the Social Science syllabus. This study also aims to develop multimedia applications and apply these to teaching activities, and additionally to increase the learning competencies of students in the subject of Social Sciences. This study involved eight students who have mild intellectual disability at a vocational high school. A thorough multiple probe design was used among single-subject research models. Comparison of the results revealed that students’ post-test scores increased significantly when compared to the pre-test scores, and that the teaching materials had a significantly positive impact on their learning process. Moreover, the effect of the prepared digitalized materials on learning was determined to be high in terms of its application in special education schools. Students indicated that they liked these activities which they engaged on computers, as well as the interactive multiple choices questions, and wished to have such creative applications made available for other subjects such as Turkish, Mathematics, Music, and Art.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- The impact of reading fluency level on interactive information retrieval
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Abstract: Abstract Given an information need and the corresponding set of documents retrieved, it is known that user assessments for such documents differ from one user to another. One frequent reason that is put forward is the discordance between text complexity and user reading fluency. We explore this relationship from three different dimensions: quantitative features, subjective-assessed difficulty, and reader/text factors. In order to evaluate quantitative features, we wondered whether it is possible to find differences between documents that are evaluated by the user and those that are ignored according to the complexity of the document. Secondly, a task related to the evaluation of the relevance of short texts is proposed. For this end, users evaluated the relevance of these short texts by answering 20 queries. Documents complexity and relevance assessments were done previously by some human experts. Then, the relationship between participants assessments, experts assessments and document complexity is studied. Finally, a third experimentation was performed under the prism of neuro-Information Retrieval: while the participants were monitored with an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, we tried to find a correlation among EEG signal, text difficulty and the level of comprehension of texts being read during the EEG recording. In light of the results obtained, we found some weak evidence showing that users responded to queries according to text complexity and user’s reading fluency. For the second and third group of experiments, we administered a sub-test from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test to ensure that participants had a roughly average reading fluency. Nevertheless, we think that additional variables should be studied in the future in order to achieve a sound explanation of the interaction between text complexity and user profile.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Technology-enhanced and game based learning for children with special
needs: a systematic mapping study-
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Abstract: Abstract Technology-based education of children with special needs has become the focus of many research works in recent years. The wide range of different disabilities that are encompassed by the term “special needs”, together with the educational requirements of the children affected, represent an enormous multidisciplinary challenge for the research community. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of technology-enhanced and game-based learning systems and methods applied on children with special needs. The article analyzes the state-of-the-art of the research in this field by selecting a group of primary studies and answering a set of research questions. Although there are some previous systematic reviews, it is still not clear what the best tools, games or academic subjects (with technology-enhanced, game-based learning) are, out of those that have obtained good results with children with special needs. The 18 articles selected (carefully filtered out of 614 contributions) have been used to reveal the most frequent disabilities, the different technologies used in the prototypes, the number of learning subjects, and the kind of learning games used. The article also summarizes research opportunities identified in the primary studies.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- HELF (Haptic Encoded Language Framework): a digital script for deaf-blind
and visually impaired-
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Abstract: Purpose Digital media has brought a revolution, making the world a global village. For people who are visually impaired and people with visual and hearing impairment, navigating through the digital world can be as precarious as moving through the real world. To enable them to connect with the digital world, we propose a solution, Haptic Encoded Language Framework (HELF), that uses haptic technology to enable them to write digital text using swiping gestures and understand the text through vibrations. Method We developed an Android application to present the concept of HELF and evaluate its performance. We tested the application on 13 users (five visually impaired and eight sighted individuals). Results The preliminary exploratory analysis of the proposed framework using the Android application developed reveals encouraging results. Overall, the reading accuracy has been found to be approximately 91%, and the average CPM is found to be 25.7. Conclusion The volunteering users of the HELF Android application found it useful as a means of using the digital media and recommended its usage as an assistive technology for the visually challenged. The results of their performance of using the application motivate further research and development in the proposed work to make HELF more usable by people who are visually impaired and people with visual and hearing impairment.
PubDate: 2023-03-01
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- Acknowledgement to reviewers for reviews completed during 2022
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PubDate: 2023-02-25
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