Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  EICS 2024 marks the sixteenth international ACM SIGCHI conference, focused on engineering interactive computing systems and their user interfaces. The conference explores research at the intersection of user interface design, software engineering, and computational interaction. Our research paper, " All in One Place: Ensuring Usable Access to Online Shopping Items for Blind Users ," was published in the June 2024 issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 8, in the EICS category . In this blog post, I will summarize our research paper, which focuses on alleviating the significant interaction challenges that blind users encounter when navigating through dispersed content across multiple sections and pages on shopping websites. These issues arise because information related to shopping items is frequently spread across different web page sect...

  Figure 1: Example of AccessBolt with File Explorer application. (Figure 1 from Utku et al.) Introduction User interface (UI) automation is the process of programmatically controlling and testing the UI of applications. In our last blog on UI automation, we talk about the ideas of using it and walkthrough of these interesting tools using the Python programming language. The main purposes of UI automation are to simulate user interactions for testing, increase test coverage, and reduce repetitive manual testing. In this blog, we are going to talk about a recently published paper named “ Taming User-Interface Heterogeneity with Uniform Overlays for Blind Users, ” published at the UMAP 2022 conference, where Utku et al. explored how to improve the accessibility of desktop application interfaces for blind individuals who rely on screen readers . The paper introduces a novel system called AccessBolt that aims to make interacting with desktop software easier and more efficient using...

  Figure 1: A proposed heuristics-based approach to automatically generate a narrative given a time-series dataset (Figure 1 in Siu et al. ) The use of online data visualizations is becoming more crucial in informing the public and aiding decision-making. However, most guidelines and tools for creating these visualizations are centered around visuals, leaving little consideration for screen reader users who rely on non-visual methods to access data. As a result, there needs to be more exploration of alternative representations that cater to their needs. In the paper “ Supporting Accessible Data Visualization Through Audio Data Narratives, ”, published at CHI 2022 conference, Siu et al. introduced audio data narratives and accessible data representation for screen reader users that use image descriptions and sonification to provide direct, multimodal, and up-to-date access to data. These narratives employ image descriptions and sonification to offer direct, multimodal, and real-ti...

Figure 1: The virtual cover of the IUI '22 conference. In 2022, there were 268 million online shoppers in the United States. This number will increase to almost 285 million online shoppers in 2025. It’s become a much easier way to shop, considering that it doesn’t require you to leave your house. People every day go to online websites to buy their goods based on their preferences. An e-commerce website like Walmart or Amazon consists of web data records that are integral components of many websites [Figure 2]. These websites present structured information by querying from a database. Examples include a list of products or services, such as items on a shopping website, available hotel rooms on a travel website, and so on. In this blog, I will discuss our work titled “ InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data Records. ” which was published at the 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . The work focuses on improvi...

How we portray and engage with the world around us is fundamentally influenced by our sense of vision. The visual area is located in about one-third of the cortical surface of the primates. Vision loss, either at birth or much later in life, affects how we perceive the world. It is intriguing to know how the brain of sighted and blind individuals differ. In the  paper  "The nature of consciousness in the visually deprived brain," the authors  Ron Kupers ,  Pietro Pietrini ,  Emiliano Ricciardi , and  Maurice Ptito  discuss various topics pertaining to the nature of consciousness in those without vision. This research answered an important question: What can we learn about the functional development of the human brain in physiological conditions by studying blindness?    (Source:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00019 ) There are some findings from research on animals as well as from psychophysical and functional brain imaging studies ...