Introducing Intermodality for Social Tools
by Kent Saxin Hammarström and Kristina Höök
The Convene project at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science
deals with improving the interface to text-based virtual environments
(MUD’s), used for recreational and social purposes, for users
with disablements (a group that constitutes 10-20% of the world
population). These systems are potentially useful ‘social tools’
for those restricted from full participation in social relationships
and leisure, but have received little attention in terms of how
to make them more accessible.
MUD’s are a type of networked systems, primarily used for recreational
purposes, such as games and social interaction, since the early
80’s. What distinguishes them from other forms of computer mediated
communication is that they involve real-time interaction between
multiple users and between users and a virtual world.
MUD systems could be excellent social tools for users with certain
forms of disablements that would open up both an accessible form
of recreation and a social venue with lower barriers to interacting
with others.
The aim of the project is to see what problems - if any - users
with disablements experience in these environments and how these
could be alleviated. Our two studies done so far (one with a group
of users with muscle dystrophy and one of blind users) indicate
that one of the major, software-related problems is not qualitatively
different from that of any user: information overload. This manifests
itself in problems with navigation in the MUD worlds, problems
with keeping the pace of the quite fast interaction between users,
and finally, problems with the actual contents and social behaviours
in these environments. We would like to point out that we are
all experiencing these problems to some degree; activity limitations
(disabilities) simply exacerbate this.
We have chosen to use multimodality as the main thrust of how
to improve these interfaces, in the form that we call ‘intermodality’,
ie designing a modular software architecture that facilitates
translating information from one representation (initially primarily
textual) to one more suited to the user and the situation. We
take textual input from the MUD world, such as, rooms descriptions,
dialogues between users, events in the world, etc., and divide
it into different channels: the room description channel, the
dialogue channel, etc. The user can then choose which channel
to present as audio, text, pictures, etc. For example, the room
descriptions might be sent to the user as text, the dialogue with
other users might be presented as speech output, and the structure
of the world (which ‘doors’ a room contains) can be showns as
a ‘map’. Our fundamental vision is to solve the problem that it
is the producer rather than the consumer determines the form of
information - through dividing the information into different
channels and allowing users to set these up as they please, the
control is handed back to the consumer. This approach has two
facets:
- allowing compensation for functional impairments
- reducing the cognitive load by allowing the user to have information
presented in complementary channels (eg utterances from other
participants through speech synthesis and descriptions through
a Braille display).
The project has a practical and problem-oriented, rather than
technology-oriented, focus: Can we design a software architecture
that allows creating programs that make existing MUD systems more
accessible, without requiring additional, expensive equipment,
using the resources the user would normally have at her disposal?
The actual networking technologies used are thus the ‘tried and
true’ in the form of existing MUD environments (predominantly
using TCP/IP and Telnet over the Internet) rather than innovative
ones, and the focus is on improving the software user interface
to these technologies.
In summary, Convene aims to put the control over the form of information
into the hands of the (disabled) users in order to enable them
to access existing textual MUD environments.
This project is financed by the Swedish Institute of Computer
Science (SICS), The Swedish Transport and Communications Research
Board (KFB), and The Swedish National Board for Industrial and
Technical Development (NUTEK). The Swedish Handicap Institute
(HI) and the Swedish National Association for Disabled Children
and Young People (RBU) contribute as advisors.
More information about the project can be found at:
http://www.sics.se/~kia/convene/
Please contact:
Kent Saxin Hammarström - SICS
E-mail: kent@sics.se
Tel: +46 18 471 7041
