Input Adaptation Toolkit
Toolkit-level Support for Universal Input Device Translation
The goal of the Input Adaptation Tooolkit project(IAT) is to provide theoretical and architectural support for input device translation/adaptation and make existing applications more "accessible" for people who have to use alternative input devices. The graphical user interface (GUI) is today's de facto standard for desktop computing. GUIs are designed and optimized for use with a mouse and keyboard. However, modern trends make this reliance on a mouse and keyboard problematic for two reasons. First, people with disabilities may have trouble operating those devices. Second, with the popularization of wireless communication and mobile devices such as personal data assistants, the mouse and keyboard are often replaced by other input devices.
Existing work focuses on either establishing a new architecture from scratch, or translating the output of an application to accessible format. In contrast, we created a toolkit that added an indirection layer between input devices and applications to translate a user's input to a form recognizable by any Windows-based application. To create such a tool, we believe that formal models of input adaptation are necessary to provide theoretical underpinnings for input translations. We described input devices as Markov information sources, and borrowed ideas from information theory to model the input device translation process. This model extends past work in its ability to handle software-based input such as speech recognition, and gives quantitative measurements of relative device bandwidth.
It has been suggested in the past that specialized interfaces are the best solution to such problems, and indeed in some areas this is the approach that has been taken. However, from a universal access perspective, this solution is not tenable. It leads to a situation in which the "accessible" version of a piece of software lags one or more versions behind the "standard" version, leaving those with disabilities at a further disadvantage. Although our toolkit does not intend to make the adaptation process completely automatic and foolproof, it will save designers and programmers a significant amount of time in making input device specific applications accessible to other input devices.
Sample Application
Publications
- Jingtao Wang, Jennifer Mankoff, Theoretical and Architectural Support for Input Device Adaptation, ACM Conference on Universal Usability: CUU 2003. Vancouver, B.C., November 10-11, 2003.
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