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Improving accessibility with user-tailored interfaces

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Abstract

The first stage in the design of a user interface is the quest for its ‘typical user’, an abstract generalization of each user of the application. However, in web systems and other scenarios where the application can be used by dozens of different kinds of users, the identification of this ‘typical user’ is quite difficult, if not impossible. Our proposal is to avoid the construction of interactive dialogs during the design stage, building them dynamically once the specific cognitive, perceptual and motor requirements of the current user are known: that is, during the execution stage. This is the approach used by GADEA, an intelligent user interface management system (UIMS) able to separate the functionality of an application from its interface in real time. The system adapts the components of the interface depending on the information stored in a user model which is continuously updated by a small army of data-gathering agents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Human Communication and Interaction Research Group (HCI-RG), Department of Computer Science, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Martín Gonzalez-Rodriguez, Jorge Manrubia, Agueda Vidau & Marcos Gonzalez-Gallego

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  1. Martín Gonzalez-Rodriguez
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  2. Jorge Manrubia
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  3. Agueda Vidau
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  4. Marcos Gonzalez-Gallego
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Correspondence to Martín Gonzalez-Rodriguez.

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Gonzalez-Rodriguez, M., Manrubia, J., Vidau, A. et al. Improving accessibility with user-tailored interfaces. Appl Intell 30, 65–71 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-007-0098-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-007-0098-3

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