Posts

Showing posts from December, 2020

2020-12-31: A Doctoral Degree Takes the Lifetime of a Bird and Then Some

Image
It was a fine afternoon and I had just finished my weekly meeting with my advisor Michael L. Nelson in which we discussed a few potential topics for my doctoral research after completing my masters degree . I dropped my meeting notes on the desk of my cubicle and went downstairs for a walk in the Old Dominion University (ODU) campus. It was a pleasant sunny weather outside, so I sat on a bench near a small pond behind the Computer Science building to enjoy the fountain in the pond and to observe turtles taking sun bath, of which, a few small ones were stacked on the backs of the big ones. I noticed a long-stem grass around the edge of the pond that reminded me of a grass we used to use for crafting in my village in India during my childhood. I picked a few stems, took them upstairs, washed them, weaved them into a bird, and hanged the bird from the wall of my cubicle. Later, it was moved to the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) Research Group 's PhD Crush board where it dr

2020-12-30: UI Automation: A walkthrough with UI Automation

Image
Fig: a demonstration of UI Automation in Notepad Essential criteria for accessibility assistance in the application are programmatic access and keyboard access. To test accessibility for people with different disabilities and limitations or those who prefer to use a keyboard, it is important that you test the accessibility of your Windows applications, assistive technology (AT) tools, and user interface (UI) frameworks.  You will not be able to use your application for users with visual, learning, dexterity/mobility, and with language/commune impairments or disabilities, without appropriate access through AT such as screen readers and on-screen keyboards. In the last blog , I talked about some high-level concepts on UI Automation (UIA). In this walkthrough, I’ll give a snippet on how to use UIA on Notepad.  You can write your script using C++, C#, or Python.   Microsoft uses C++ and C# for their UI Automation and all kinds of testing.  However, most of the developers use Python, sinc

2020-12-29: #WebArchiveWednesday Tweets from @WebSciDL in 2020

Image
#WebArchiveWednesday began in 2019, first with @TroveAustralia promoting the Australian Web Archive , and then later adopted by the IIPC for World Digital Preservation Day 2019 .  The IIPC generated some momentum for establishing it as a weekly hashtag, and one that the we in the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( @WebSciDL ) have a pretty good record of regularly participating in, starting in about March.  Toward the end of the calendar year, it occurred to me that a year's worth of #WebArchiveWednesday has made for an engaging reading list.   Below I provide an edited list of the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets from or about our group during 2020.  Many are announcing our own software releases, trip reports, defenses, blog posts, and other contributions, but I also made an effort to provide commentary about the web archiving work of others as well.  This list should not be taken as definitive, but rather as an almost weekly selection of whatever caught our eye on (or nea