Understanding how users interact with systems and experience usability issues is vital in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Existing approaches often focus on isolated data types, such as interaction logs or subjective reports, providing only a partial view of the user experience. This work introduces AMUSED, a multimodal dataset that integrates user interaction logs, physiological signals, facial emotion features, and self-assessment reports. The dataset includes expert annotations of eleven types of usability smells, creating a rich resource for investigating relationships between usability problems, user behavior, and emotional states. We conducted experiments with 70 participants interacting with three social networks containing usability issues. We then evaluated various machine learning models to assess the feasibility of automatically detecting these issues. The dataset comprises 24 h of user recordings, with over 20,000 user events, such as clicks, scrolls, and input changes. Our analysis reveals that (i) usability smells frequently co-occur, (ii) negative emotions predominate when severe usability issues arise, and (iii) Gradient Boosting models achieve up to 92% accuracy in detecting usability smells, demonstrating the potential for computational methods in automated usability evaluation. Our findings emphasize the value of emotional metrics in HCI research and highlight promising uses of machine learning to automatically detect usability issues.

This research presents a catalog of pedagogical practices, theories/methods, and teaching procedures for the elderly. Aging is a natural part of life and is a process of progressive and differential degradation. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgency of care for the elderly public. During the lockdown period, this audience’s use of digital technologies grew, especially mobile devices. Despite the increase in the use of these devices, we see that the apps have not been developed considering the particular characteristics of the elderly, since aging can bring challenges and changes related to physical, sensory, perceptual, or cognitive issues. In the context of m-learning apps, it becomes even more urgent to consider pedagogical and accessibility aspects for this audience through specific guidelines for this domain. However, to propose such a guideline, it is necessary to know to define the scope and understand the user’s context. Focusing on this context, we could mention AGE Guidelines - a set of m-learning pedagogical and accessibility guidelines for the elderly. This paper aims to discuss some aspects of the experimental and description phases to develop such guidelines: the establishment of a catalog of pedagogical practices, theories/methods, and teaching procedures. To create this catalog, six interviews with teachers specialized in the education of the elderly were carried out. Based on Bardin’s method, the interviews were recorded and transcribed for later analysis. As a contribution, we expect that the presented catalog will help construct new educational artifacts, including pedagogical practices, theories/methods, and teaching procedures that effectively enable the teaching and learning process of the elderly in practice.

Mobile applications play an important role in many aspects of life. It is essential to be aware of the software development approaches that can support the design of accessible applications. Their main goal is to ensure that the interactive applications are available to everyone, including people with disabilities, reduced skills, or momentarily induced impairments. This paper aims to identify the accessibility barriers that occur when using design patterns for building user interfaces of mobile apps and propose guidelines to prevent the problems most often encountered. We start by conducting a gray literature review in professional forums and blogs to reveal the difficulties developers face when using mobile user interface design patterns. We thus compiled a catalog which contains the descriptions of 9 user interface design patterns, the accessibility barriers linked to the use of each pattern and the guidelines that can be followed to prevent the problem of these barriers. We carried out an evaluation of the use of the catalog with 60 participants. Our results show that in most cases, the guidelines were correctly applied for the prototyping of mobile user interfaces. The findings also revealed the usefulness and ease-of-use of the guidelines from the perspective of the participants.

This research full paper presents an investigation on pedagogical practices and educational methods used by professionals who work in the teaching of the elderly. The study of the ageing process is one of the most significant research trends of the 21st century and represents new social, educational and computational challenges. Increased life expectancy and the number of elderly elevate the heterogeneity in the segment, beyond the age. This research focuses on education and mobile learning (m-learning) application. Considering the elderly audience, it is necessary to develop m-learning apps based on accessibility and pedagogical proposals, since the elderly may have their physical and cognitive abilities compromised due to age. Currently, there are consolidated accessibility guidelines for software development. However, these guidelines do not regard cognitive, language and learning disabilities. These points are necessary for the process of developing m-learning applications, especially those specific to the elderly user. Thus, this paper aims to present the results of a survey applied with 33 professionals (teachers, pedagogues, gerontologists and others) involved in the education of the elderly. Issues involving teaching practices for the elderly, content preparation, interactivity, and motivation are addressed. This study is part of a larger project aimed to contribute to the development of accessibility and pedagogical guidelines that aim to assist in the process of developing m-learning applications focused on the elderly.

In this research full paper we present a set of requirements for an m-learning application for the elderly. Currently, the elderly population has been growing considerably. This fact leads to the country and society adapt and create new opportunities for this audience, since they can present changes and challenges of aging. One of this challenges involves the educational area. Education can take place formally or informally, with face-to-face or distance classes and, in this context, emerges the concept of mobile learning (or m-learning). This modality of learning has generated great expectations for educators and learners, since it has benefits related to the flexibility of learning, especially regarding the adaptation with respect to space and time of use. Based on this potential for flexibility and adaptation, one of the main goals of m-learning is to democratize access to education. Thus, m-learning applications must be adequate and structured to serve the general population, including the elderly. Considering this audience, it is necessary to develop accessible and pedagogically appropriate m-learning applications, since these users may have different skills in comparison with younger students. Elderly people may have their physical, sensory, perception and cognitive abilities compromised due to the aging process and, therefore, m-learning applications must be developed based on these needs. In this paper we present the requirements elicitation process for a m-learning app, focused on elderly users. The requirements were created based on works that involve eliciting requirements for m-learning in general, pedagogical pattern language for this type of domain and pedagogical and accessibility guidelines for m-learning app focused on the elderly. At the very end, such requirements will support the development of a crossword mobile application to the elderly, which should contribute to the learning process of such audience.

The constant evolution of the Web has covered various segments of society and, as it evolves, its content must be accessible to different users’ profiles. Older adults (60+) are the fastest growing population of users who face difficulties in interacting with websites, due to limitations in their abilities caused by the aging process. Despite the legislation and guidelines established for the development of accessible and usable web contents, several problems of accessibility and usability still must be solved. In particular, most website designers do not take into account the older adult’s profile. This paper introduces Sene-check checklist, a support to web accessibility and usability evaluations for the Brazilian older profile developed according to scientific procedures, including the following three perspectives: (1) literature review, (2) point of view of experts and developers and (3) point of view of Brazilian older adults. The results enabled an investigation into the main problems encountered by older adults regarding web interaction and reinforced the relevance of a support for the evaluation of web accessibility and usability.

This Research Full Paper presents a systematic mapping that aims to characterize the current scenario of mobile application development considering accessibility issues for elderly people. Currently, the use of mobile devices has been growing exponentially, giving way to new ways of relating, working, performing daily tasks and learning. In this context, mobile learning has emerged seeking to democratize access to knowledge for different audiences. To achieve this democratization, it is necessary to develop mobile learning applications considering accessibility issues, in order to reduce barriers that might exist. Due to the increase of the life expectancy, such applications must also be accessible for elderly users. In this context, we conducted a systematic mapping that aims to characterize the current scenario of mobile application development considering accessibility issues for older people. The idea is that the results help us to establish a set of accessibility guidelines to assist in the process of developing and evaluating mobile learning applications for senior users. To achieve the main objective, 32 studies were considered to extract the data. The results obtained are relevant to highlight the current panorama of the area, as well as to present discussions about the need for studies related to the development of accessible mobile applications.

In cloud computing, lock-in refers to the difficulty of porting an application from one platform to another. An example of such difficulty can be witnessed when porting an application from Platform-as-a-Service Google App Engine to Microsoft Azure. Differences in their implementations are substantial, yielding non-portable applications. Standardization could address this problem, but existing initiatives are still to be accepted. This paper addresses lock-in by proposing a model-driven engineering design approach that decouples platform specific code from the application logic. The resulting platform-independent models, as well as corresponding model transformations, can be reused to generate distinct platform-specific implementations, hence reducing the programming effort spent coding repetitive tasks. Such transformations can be made available for reuse on a repository for cloud providers. We have implemented transformations to handle persistence for Google App Engine and Azure, and discuss how model-driven engineering can reconcile the differences between features of the persistence models of GAE and Azure.

The Web 2.0 brought new requirements to the architecture of web systems. Web applications’ interfaces are becoming more and more interactive. However, these changes are severely impacting how disabled users interact through assistive technologies with the web. In order to deploy an accessible web application, developers can use WAI-ARIA to design an accessible web application, which manually implements focus and keyboard navigation mechanisms. This article presents a quantitative metric, named Fona, which measures how the Focus Navigation WAI-ARIA requirement has been implemented on the web. Fona counts JavaScript mouse event listeners, HTML elements with role attributes, and TabIndex attributes in the DOM structure of webpages. Fona’s evaluation approach provides a narrow analysis of one single accessibility requirement. But it enables monitoring this accessibility requirement in a large number of webpages. This monitoring activity might be used to give insights about how Focus Navigation and ARIA requirements have been considered by web development teams. Fona is validated comparing the results of a set of WAI-ARIA conformant implementations and a set of webpages formed by Alexa’s 349 top most popular websites. The analysis of Fona’s value for Alexa’s websites highlights that many websites still lack the implementation of Focus Navigation through their JavaScript interactive content.

Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionize the way systems are developed and marketed. The cloud has become an important research subject in software engineering nowadays. Among the many research gaps related to this new computing model is the lack of portability between cloud platforms, which generates the Data Lock-In. The Data Lock-In is the difficulty in migrating data and applications from a cloud platform to another. This work presents a model-driven approach for promoting cloud portability, in the context of PaaS (Platform as a Service). The initial results indicate that the use of MDE in cloud computing can facilitate cloud adoption, as well as the migration between the different platforms offered in the market.

In this paper we investigate the main linguistic phenomena that can make texts complex and how they could be simplified. We focus on a corpus analysis of simple account texts available on the web for Brazilian Portuguese and propose simplification strategies for this language. This study illustrates the need for text simplification to facilitate accessibility to information by poor literacy readers and potentially by people with other cognitive disabilities. It also highlights characteristics of simplification for Portuguese, which may differ from other languages. Such study consists of the first step towards building Brazilian Portuguese text simplification systems. One of the scenarios in which these systems could be used is that of reading electronic texts produced, e.g., by the Brazilian government or by relevant news agencies.

The increasing volume of research projects on applied computing is a motivation for analyzing processes which are used to develop such projects. There are significative differences between research projects on applied computing and industrial software projects, for example, in research domain there is the interest in prototype development instead of product development. As a consequence,definition of specific processes to attend this context is required. Additionally, these processes are relevant because, with the wide spread of the Internet, many researchers are working on collaborative projects from geographically distant areas and an adjusted process can help management overtime of artifacts like models, prototypes, and scientific documents. In this paper, the goal is to provide a comparative review of processes for research development on applied computing, based on requirements described in the literature. He hope that results of this review be useful to help researchers to select one approach or defining their own process.

This paper discusses an approach for Web accessibility education tacking advantage of short introductory courses. In this approach, screen readers were used toallimmerse students in the problems experienced by blind users while using the Web. Experimental results from an evaluation exercise carried out by students showedallthat the use ofallscreen readers was helpful to better understand and to reinforce the concepts of Web accessibility.

Software engineering and reuse-oriented tools have been studied along the last years, aiming to provide help in the software development. With the importance of reuse growing significantly, effective software reuse tools and environments started to be needed. This paper presents and discusses some works that comprise many issues related to source code search tools, covered by university and industry since 90's until today. In the end of the paper, a set of requirements is presented, integrating the features that can be found in most works of the area, serving as a basis for future work toward an effective source code search tool.

Both content driven web authors and application designers may have their attention deviated from their main task when they have to be concerned with the generation of elaborated linking structures. This work aims to demonstrate how a metadata-enhanced web-based open linking service can be exploited towards supporting content driven authors in their tasks. The following results are presented in this paper: (a) the Web Linking Service (WLS), a novel open hypermedia system that stores and exchanges metadata in RDF standard syntax for hypertext structures across the wire and (b) two case studies in which applications offer to their users the ability to create linking structures upon existing contents by making use the WLS service.