Project Overview
Contents of this page
Introduction to the project
PLEASE REMEMBER: The majority
of your grade comes from the project. Therefore, it requires a
significant amount of good work. Your project is worth 60% of the
course mark. Thus it
needs to be a significant
accomplishment for you, considerably beyond the material in your
proposal.
The project expectations involve
different amounts of accomplishment depending on whether the course is
taken as 480 or 840.
- Undergraduate level projects can, but do not have to, include
programming.
- Graduate level projects (for CMPT 840 credit) should include some
form of programming development in addition to a suitable report.
This project requires students to investigate a
related topic in greater detail than is covered in the class. Students
are advised to discuss possible projects with the instructor prior to
creating their proposal.
It is expected that your project will involve analyzing (researching /
identifying needs), implementing (some contribution based on your
analysis), and evaluating (the results of your implementation) some
aspect of Accessible Computing at a level more advanced than that
covered by the main portion of this class.
Stages of the project
The project is broken into the following stages to help you to be
successful and to get your work done on time:
- Project Proposal
- Project Analysis and Design
- Project Evaluation
- including Project Implementation (required for CMPT 840 students only)
- Project Presentation
- Revised Project
- If
you choose not to revise your project, this mark will be based on the
marks for your Analysis and Design and for your Evaluation
- If
you choose to submit a revised project, this mark will be based on the
marks for your revised Analysis and Design and for your revised
Evaluation
Each of these stages is described in detail in its own page.
Choosing a project
Most types of projects should not be too narrow. They should deal
with some significant accessibility issue. They can do this by
including a number of specific instances that are representative of
this issue.
- Accessibility evaluations of Web sites need to deal with a large
number of major pages that are parts of a given Web site. They will
need to include criteria for selecting the set of pages to be evaluated
and a method for analyzing accessibility in a manner suitable for
reporting problems to senior management.
- Projects that involve analyzing, combining, or mapping different
concepts should involve multiple attributes of the different concepts
in the analysis, combination, or mapping.
- Potential lab assignments need to include multiple interactive
activities that demonstrate a range of similar problems. These
interactive activities should be as accessible as possible. For 840
students, these activities must include some activities that are
accessible to students who are blind and some activities that are
accessible to students who are deaf.
- Potential tools need to work for a range of instances of the
accessibility issue that they deal with. Multiple significantly
different instances should be discussed and demonstrated.
You should choose a project where:
- you have some interest in the topic, so that you will be
motivated to do a good job
- there is sufficient background informaiton, so that you can do an
informed job
- there is some interesting problem still to be solved, so that you
can do a productive job
There are some examples of good project topics
and of the good outcomes of previous
projects below.
PLEASE NOTE: It is highly
recommended that you book a half hour appointment with the instructor
at least a week before your porposal is due to discuss what might make
a good topic for you.
Exmples of good project topics:
PLEASE NOTE: These are not the
only possible types of topics. Talk your ideas over with the instructor
as soon as possible to help you to identify a good topic.
480 Projects could include:
- Investigate some area of accessibility issue in depth and create
a set of guidelines, examples, and related material that can help
developers to design systems in an accessible manner that meets the
needs of that accessibility issue.
- There are various topics to be found in the User Needs Summary
that could be investigated
- It is important that this type of project provide solution
strategies as well as identifying problems (challenges/opportunities)
- Survey related literature regarding diffferent types of
accessibility evaluations and propose guidance on when and how to use
these evaluations, including
- evaluating which user needs (from the User Needs Summary) are
met by a system
- evaluating which disabilities are supported by a system
- evaluating compliance of a system to accessibility standards
- testing the accessibility of a system in a test setting
- testing the accessibility of a system in the environment in
which it is being used
- Surveying related literature and developing a comprehensive code
of ethics relating to providing accessible computing, including:
- a code of ethics for individual practitioners
- a code of ethics for organizations
- NOTE:
- this is a relatively new area and would require looking into
related areas as well as into the field of computer accessibility
- this would require not only codes that can be briefly stated,
but also supporting explanations that could be used to interpret and
explain the codes
- Identify and organize candidates for voice command vocabularies.
- This could include
- identifying common types of objects and actions/functions
from a large variety of software applications (to
- identifying existing voice command
vocabularies (e.g. from operating systems such as Windows, from
dictation programs such as Dragon Dictate, from media player control
such as the music system in Ford cars, etc.)
- It would also invovle organizing the results into logical groups
- Exploring the potential to use hci dialog patterns (user
interface design patterns) for to support adaptive interfaces for
purposes of increasing accessibility.
- Dialog patterns are useful in identifying common sequences of
interactions that can be used frequently within an application
- The use of dialog patterns can
- reduce the need to for coding (by allowing the use of a
single algorithm to work with various sets of dialog)
- improve the consistency and predictability of interactions
- limit the work required to implement the application in
alternate environments, modalities, languages
- Evaluate the accessibility of a major public Web site (e.g. the
Computer Science Department site, the U of S site, the PAWS site, the
U. of S Library site, the City of Saskatoon Site, the Saskatoon Public
Library site) and providing a formal
report to the owners of the Web site discussing the accessibility
issues you have uncovered and suggesting improvements that could be
made to their site to make it more accessible.
- NOTE:
- as part of the
background to your proposal you should ensure that the site chosen has
enough accessibility issues and enough different pages to make this a
significant project.
- you will be expected to develop a report that provides a
good explanation of the problems and a good estimation of the extent of
work involved in fixing these problems that is understandable by senior
management without expecting them to have any knowledge of computer
science. This requires considerable effort beyond just running
evaluation software (as you do in the assignment on evaluating web
accessibility. Failure to provide a good report for management has led
previous students to unsatisfactory completions of this type of project.
480/840 Projects could include:
- Developing an interactive assignment (ADE) that could be used
with this
class to demonstrate some aspect of accessibility not covered by the
current set of assignments.
- There are various topics to be found in the User Needs Summary
that could be developed into good ADE's
- It is important that your project include both a new ADE and a suitable report describing
what you have done and why you did it to create this ADE
- Developing a tool to help provide accessibility to some type of
applications
- Some types of tools include:
- a tool to provide an accessible database of information on
different accessibility standards that could be used by developers
looking for standards relating to specific problem domains
- a tool to evaluate web pages for possible
cultural / linguistic inaccessibilities
- a tool to help users with disabilities interact with some
specialized application
- a tool that could contribute to Raising
the
Floor or the National Public Inclusive
Infrastructure
- Develop a game that is accessible for users who cannot normally
access the majority of computer based games
- this needs to involve more than a simple text-based command
line interface (as was used with computer games decades ago)
- Investigate the unique use of some form of interaction to provide
an accessible substitute for the "traditional" way things are done
- USERLab has a variety of tactile devices, other
specialized devices / software may be available elsewhere in the
Department, or students can provide their own devices / software
- Examples could include:
- exploring the design and use of "earcons" (auditory icons) or
"tactons" (tactile icons) as replacements for graphical icons [we have
various tactile devices that could be used]
- exploring accessibility issues with pda's (including advanced
cell phones) [we cannot provide you with these devices]
Example outcomes of previous
projects
PLEASE NOTE: The documentation
describing the outcomes of various previous projects below are taken
from a number of different documents produced for a variety of purposes
(and have often received additional development beyond what was handed
in as a project). They are not formatted in the same manner as your
project reports are expected to be formatted. They also may contain
various challenges and opportunities.
- Universal Access
Reference Model, David Fourney. The first offering of this class
led to the development of: J. Carter and D. Fourney, 2004, Using a Universal
Access
Reference Model to Identify Further Guidance that belongs in ISO 16071,
Universal Access in the
Information Society, 3(1):17-29. [available
from U of S Library via Springerlink: http://www.springerlink.com.cyber.usask.ca/content/1615-5297/]
- USERLab ADEs, many of the assignments you use in this class have
been developed by students taking this course, including
- DBVisAssist, a tool to help blind
software developers create E-R diagrams, by Tanya Lung
- I-Match, reauirements and design of a
tool to help all people to match colors of clothes, by Hrisham Mustafa
- Guidelines for meaningful
Alt-text, by Ndon Nyong
Copyright © 2006, 2012 - Jim
A.
Carter
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