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Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

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Abstract

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform’s architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/webinos/app-travel-manager.

  2. https://developer.webinos.org/webinostv.

  3. https://developer.webinos.org/creativenotes.

  4. https://github.com/webinos/app-file-manager.

  5. https://developer.webinos.org/inrush.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5, Objective 1.2) under grant agreement number 257103 (webinos project). The authors thank all Webinos project partners, as this article draws upon their work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University – iMinds, Ghent, Belgium

    Heiko Desruelle & Frank Gielen

  2. BMW Forschung und Technik GmbH, Munich, Germany

    Simon Isenberg

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece

    Andreas Botsikas

  4. MultiLayer Wireless solutions (MAIN), Istituto Superiore Mario Boella (ISMB), Turin, Italy

    Paolo Vergori

Authors
  1. Heiko Desruelle
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  2. Simon Isenberg
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  3. Andreas Botsikas
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  4. Paolo Vergori
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  5. Frank Gielen
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Correspondence to Heiko Desruelle.

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Desruelle, H., Isenberg, S., Botsikas, A. et al. Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations. Univ Access Inf Soc 15, 5–19 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-014-0373-0

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