To ensure the privacy of participants is an ethical and legal obligation for researchers. Yet, achieving anonymity can be technically difficult. When observing participants over time one needs ...mechanisms to link the data from the different sessions. Also, it is often necessary to expand the sample of participants during a project.
To help researchers simplify the administration of such studies the CANDIDATE tool is proposed. This tool allows simple, unique, and anonymous participant IDs to be generated on the fly.
Simulations were used to validate the uniqueness of the IDs as well as their anonymity.
The tool can successfully generate IDs with a low collision rate while maintaining high anonymity. A practical compromise between integrity and anonymity was achieved when the ID space is about ten times the number of participants.
The tool holds potential for making it easier to collect more comprehensive empirical evidence over time that in turn will provide a more solid basis for drawing reliable conclusions based on research data. An open-source implementation of the tool that runs locally in a web-browser is made available.
The development of navigation tools for people who are visually impaired had become an important concern in the research area of assistive technologies. This paper gives a comprehensive review of ...different articles published in the area of navigation solutions for people who are visually impaired. Unlike other review papers, this review considers major solutions that work in both the indoor or/and outdoor environments which are based on different technology. From the review, it became clear that the navigation systems proposed for the target users lack some core features that are quite important for independent navigation. Also, there can be instances in which humanitarian conditions also have to be considered in the navigation system design. Based on these findings, a set of recommendations are also given which can be considered in the future design of navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people.
This study correlated salary data with publication data for the academic employees of one of the largest HEIs in Norway. The results show that overall there was a weak correlation between publication ...output and salary. Both salary and publication output varied across ranks (low, mid, top). Apart from associate and full professors, there were no significant correlations between how productive an academic is and what an academic earns among the different groups. In fact, when comparing non-publishing and publishing low-rank contract researchers, the results show that publishing researchers earned significantly less than what their non-publishing colleagues did. A weak correlation between high-quality publications and salary was found among associate professors only. However, no significant differences in salaries were observed for academics with high-quality publications compared to those with ordinary publications. Overall, the results suggest that publication performance was not used to set salaries among academic groups with few research responsibilities.
Access to appropriate assistive technology is a challenge worldwide and especially in low GDP-per-capita countries. Nepal is one example of a country with several coinciding challenges: some claim ...having a high rate of blindness in the general population, a low-GDP-per capita and some studies claim it has a low literacy rate, especially in rural areas. Without appropriate assistive technology, some disabled youth may not get full access to education.
To gain insight into assistive technology use in rural Nepal, five blind teenagers in a mixed secondary school with disabled and non-disabled students in rural Nepal were interviewed about their daily smartphone use.
The results show that all the participants used screen readers on donated smartphones. None of the participants had received formal training in using smartphone screen readers and therefore lacked knowledge about basic and essential operational aspects of the devices as well as misguided expectations about the technology.
One implication of the findings is that smartphone accessibility features training material needs to be made easily available to schools and all disabled youth worldwide, as smartphones are increasingly becoming available in low-income remote regions with low literacy rates. The built-in accessibility features of smartphones promise disabled youth a non-stigmatizing platform for social participation and access to the information society.
Implications for Rehabilitation
The built-in accessibility features of smartphones provide disabled youth a non-stigmatizing practical platform for social participation and access to education.
Training material on how to use smartphone accessibility features needs to be made easily available to schools and all disabled youth worldwide.
The aim of this study was to identify factors that influence the perceived stigma of two assistive devices for visual impairment, namely the white cane and smart glasses.
Face-to-face semi-structured ...interviews with eight European students were conducted to probe their experiences and knowledge related to disability, assistive technology, visual impairment, as well as handheld and wearable devices.
Close relationships with disabled people seems to have a positive influence on participants perceptions about stigma, disability, and assistive technology. Academic background seems to not have any influence. The aesthetics of assistive devices was observed as an important factor that influences the adoption or abandonment of the device.
Device without negative symbolism but with modern aesthetics (smart glasses) were positively accepted by the participants than the device with traditional aesthetics and symbolisms of visual impairment (white cane). Designers should, therefore, consider aesthetics in addition to functionality in order to avoid the perceived stigma, thereby reducing the chances of device abandonment.
IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION
Understanding the factors that influence the perceived stigma associated with assistive technology can help designers and developers to reduce assistive technology abandonment and perceived stigma.
Designers need to consider both functionality and aesthetics. While functionality is crucial for the users' adaptation, aesthetics is important for the users' positive perceptions.
Inequality among people has several unwanted effects, in humanistic, social and economic contexts. Several studies address distributional preferences among groups, but little is known about when ...inequality issues are focused and when and why inequality abatement measures are brought on the political agenda. We show that during the period 2004 to 2023, inequality issues were focused during elections to the EU and UK parliament and with greatest strength during the elections to the EU parliament in May 2004 and to the UK parliament in May 2015. Periods with high unemployment and inflation cause the discussion on inequality to be followed by discussions on inequality measures. However, when the discussion of inequality is followed very closely by the discussions of abatement measures, inequality aversion becomes more strongly associated with the macroeconomic variables inflation and GDP (recessions) than with unemployment and more strongly associated with the concerns for fairness than concerns with war and crime. The results were obtained examining Google Trends and scholarly studies.
Users with reduced physical functioning such as ALS patients need more time and effort to operate computers. Most of the previous assistive technologies use prefix based predictive text input ...algorithms. Prefix based predictive text entry is suitable for languages such as English where the average word length is approximately 5 characters. Other languages such as Norwegian and German have longer mean word lengths as words are combined into longer compound words and prefix approaches are thus less effective. This paper proposes a new abbreviation expansion algorithm. Users mentally determine an abbreviation of the word, typically comprising significant consonants and the system proposes words that contain the matched characters. The approach is non disruptive in that it does not require the user to learn a new system or abbreviation mnemonics, and it can be used with any text input device. The system is dynamic and adapts to the users style of abbreviated input. The algorithm is easier to implement than previous approaches and no a priori system training is required. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that the algorithm achieves real time performance with modest computer hardware.
Multimodal interaction refers to situations where users are provided with multiple modes for interacting with systems. Researchers are working on multimodality solutions in several domains. The focus ...of this paper is within the domain of navigation systems for supporting users with visual impairments. Although several literature reviews have covered this domain, none have gone through the research synthesis of multimodal navigation systems. This paper provides a review and analysis of multimodal navigation solutions aimed at people with visual impairments. This review also puts forward recommendations for effective multimodal navigation systems. Moreover, this review also presents the challenges faced during the design, implementation and use of multimodal navigation systems. We call for more research to better understand the users’ evolving modality preferences during navigation.
It may be tempting to learn about scholars using ChatGPT. To validate ChatGPT for this task a small experiment was conducted based on the 50 most cited researchers at the author’s university. The ...results show that ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) only recognized an ad-hoc subset of the scholars with no obvious connection to the respective authors’ citation attributes or internet footprint. Moreover, details about the recognized scholars were often erroneous.
Human–computer interaction (HCI) has become an important area for designers and developers worldwide, and research activities set in national cultural contexts addressing local challenges are often ...needed in industry and academia. This study explored HCI research in the Nordic-Baltic countries using bibliometric methods. The results show that the activity varies greatly across the region with activities dominated by Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, even when adjusting for differences in population size and GDP. Research output variations were larger for the top-tier conferences compared to entry-tier conferences and journals. Locally hosted conferences were associated with local increases in research activity. HCI research longevity appears to be an indicator of research maturity and quantity. HCI researchers typically collaborated either with colleagues within the same institution or with researchers from countries outside the Nordic-Baltic region such as US and the UK. There was less collaboration between national and Nordic-Baltic partners. Collaboration appeared especially prevalent for top-tier conference papers. Top-tier conference papers were also more frequently cited than regional-tier and entry-tier conferences, yet journal articles were cited the most. One implication of this study is that the HCI research activity gaps across the Nordic-Baltic countries should be narrowed by increasing the activity in countries with low research outputs. To achieve this, first-time authors could receive guidance through collaborations with experienced authors in the same institution or other labs around the world. More conferences could also be hosted locally. Furthermore, journals may be more effective than conferences if the goal is to accumulate citations.
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