KMi Seminars
The accessibility and usability of websites: an empirical exploration
This event took place on Friday 13 May 2005 at 12:30

Prof. Helen Petrie Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design, City University London

The Web is a wonderful source of information for everyone, but for people with disabilities it is particularly important, as other sources of information may be inaccessible. The World Wide Web Consortium realized quite early the potential of the Web in providing equal access to information for disabled users and initiated the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to help web developers create content that is accessible to all users. However, the empirical basis for these guidelines has not been explored ? are websites that conform to the guidelines accessible to users with disabilities and what is the relationship of accessibility to usability? This presentation will explore these issues using data collected in two large empirical studies of the accessibility of the Web.

About the speaker:

Helen Petrie is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University London. Her main interests are the design and evaluation of technologies for disabled and elderly people, particularly the design and evaluation of the Web, and the psychological implications of new technologies such as the Web, mobile phones, instant messaging and text messaging.

 
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Multimedia and Information Systems is...


Multimedia and Information Systems
Our research is centred around the theme of Multimedia Information Retrieval, ie, Video Search Engines, Image Databases, Spoken Document Retrieval, Music Retrieval, Query Languages and Query Mediation.

We focus on content-based information retrieval over a wide range of data spanning form unstructured text and unlabelled images over spoken documents and music to videos. This encompasses the modelling of human perception of relevance and similarity, the learning from user actions and the up-to-date presentation of information. Currently we are building a research version of an integrated multimedia information retrieval system MIR to be used as a research prototype. We aim for a system that understands the user's information need and successfully links it to the appropriate information sources, be it a report or a TV news clip. This work is guided by the vision that an automated knowledge extraction system ultimately empowers people making efficient use of information sources without the burden of filing data into specialised databases.

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