Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Figure: One participant shared his shopping experience using his smartphone. (Figure 1 in Liu et al .) Introduction The emergence of online shopping has transformed consumer behavior, providing unmatched convenience. For individuals with visual impairments, it is of paramount importance, offering autonomy and accessibility that conventional shopping frequently lacks. The study 'I Bought This for Me to Look More Ordinary': A Study of Blind People Doing Online Shopping by Guanhong Liu et al. explores the intricate practices, challenges, and aspirations of blind individuals in online shopping. The study published at the CHI 2019 conference underscores how the aspiration to seem " ordinary " profoundly influences shopping behaviors, illustrating a complex interaction among societal perceptions, accessibility obstacles, and individual strategies. This paper is particularly influential in my work as it effectively summarizes the challenges and motivations within this r...

Table 1  Soper  et al. :  Classification of common OCR error types, their descriptions, and representative examples. These categories highlight challenges in text recognition systems, such as over-segmentation of words into multiple parts, merging of separate words (under-segmentation), character misinterpretations, omissions, and the generation of spurious or nonsensical content. extracted from the 'Details' page for quick and efficient information retrieval. Optical Character Recognition  (OCR) is pivotal in various applications, including online education, industrial automation, robotics, and more. The technology is designed to extract text from different image sources, ranging from scanned documents to text embedded in complex, real-world environments. However, despite its widespread adoption, OCR continues to face significant challenges due to inaccuracies in its output, as shown in Table 1 and Table 2.  Table 2  Soper et al.: Detailed examples of OC...

Figure 1 Venkatraman et al. The language use in accessibility forum discussion threads (left) differs from that in general forums (right). HT'24 -  The ACM Hypertext conference is a leading platform for presenting top-tier, peer-reviewed research on hypertext concepts, systems, and their applications. It emphasizes topics in hypertext research, including advancements in social media, the semantic web, dynamic and computational hypertext, hypermedia. Our research paper " You Shall Know a Forum by the Words they Keep: Analyzing Language Use in Accessibility Forums for Blind Users ",  was published in   HT '24: Proceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media . In this blog post, I will summarize our research paper, which dives into the unique language patterns in forums dedicated to blind users, especially those using accessibility tools like screen readers. This research not only highlights the distinct linguistic characteristics of these spaces b...

CIMA Disaster Recovery Platform Over the summer, and now into this Fall semester, I have been working on an amazing project called CIMA (Convergence, Inventory, Matching & Assignment) . I would like to share my excitement for this project and bring attention to the problems it is working to solve. The frequency of disasters in the United States is increasing  year after year . When disasters occur, homes are damaged and many victims are often left displaced in the aftermath. With a lack of resources, Low-to-Moderate Income (LMI) and medically fragile households tend to experience lengthy periods of displacement, much longer than other groups. Lengthy recovery periods are associated with increased pain and suffering and reduced longevity. These disparities in recovery times across population groups pose fundamental equity and injustice concerns. Getting displaced households quickly back on their feet through housing recovery not only helps lessen disparate health, educatio...

CIKM 2024 took place in Boise, Idaho, in the Mountain West part of the United States. The mountains in the background distinguish the pictured Idaho State Capitol from the US Capitol. ACM CIKM 2024 was held from October 21 through 25 in Boise, Idaho. There were over 800 attendees, including over 400 students! Parallel topic sessions included presentations for full papers, resource papers, and invited journal papers. Short papers were presented as posters altogether in one session. The three attendees writing this trip report are Himarsha Jayanetti and Lesley Frew (WS-DL PhD students at ODU) and Gangani Ariyarathne (PhD student at William & Mary supervised by WS-DL alum Alexander Nwala). Monday Tutorials Day 1 at #CIKM2024 ! Attending the tutorial "Collecting and Analyzing Public Data from Mastodon" by @harisbinzia to learn and gain hands-on experience with the decentralized social network, Mastodon. @WebSciDL pic.twitter.com/0GA4aC1PZ4 — Himarsha R. Jayanetti (@Himarsh...