Independent voice supporting independent life

Abstract

This paper describes USE-IT, a knowledge-based tool for automating the design of interactions at the physical level, so as to ensure accessibility of the target user interface by different user groups, including people with disabilities. To achieve this, USE-IT elicits, manipulates and interprets representations of design knowledge in order to reason about, select and decide upon lexical adaptation constituents of a user interface. Adaptation constituents are attributes of abstract interaction object classes. USE-IT generates a collection of adaptation rules (i.e. a lexical specification scenario), based on design constraints generated from three basic knowledge sources: (a) the user model, (b) the task schema, and (c) a set of platform constraints (i.e. interaction objects, attributes, device availability, etc.). A data structure called the adaptability model tree has been designed to (i) facilitate the development of plausible semantics of adaptation at the lexical level of interaction, (ii) allow unification of design constraints, and (iii) enable selection of maximally preferred design options. The output of USE-IT can be subsequently interpreted by the run-time libraries of a high-level user interface development toolkit, which provides the required implementation support for realizing the user-adapted interface on a target platform.