International audience

Despite the promotion of equal access to education, the proportion of persons with disabilities decreases drastically from primary school to higher education, resulting in a lower level of education. This lack of qualification represents an additional obstacle to employment opportunities, reinforcing their exclusion from the social sphere. In recent years, computer-based approaches to education have undergone a real revolution, as reflected by the massive growth of MOOCs platforms. As they are flexible enough, they could provide a real opportunity to create learning environments that are beneficial to persons with disabilities. Unfortunately, most MOOCs are not ‘sufficiently’ accessible, especially for persons with cognitive impairments and limited learning capacities. In this article, we describe the results of a participatory design process that involved students with cognitive impairments and specialists from various fields of expertise and led to the co-design of new functionalities to enhance the accessibility of a MOOC player. We also present the results of a multiple-cases study evaluation of a first prototype, whose results support the positive impact of our design decisions. Finally, we propose an integrative framework for the design of accessible e-learning systems derived from the different needs and guidelines that emerged during the process.

Recently, there has been a sharp increase in the number of students with disabilities (SWDs) enrolled in universities. Unfortunately SWDs still struggle to attain the same level of education as non-disabled students. This paper presents a collaborative approach between members of the student support service, researchers and a special needs student in order to improve his access to and participation in university education. We performed a person-technology match and analyzed different existing technologies. Then, we designed and printed a keyguard, keyboard stand and mobile armrest which allowed him to almost double his text entry speed on a computer. We hope that our experience will inspire other universities to better address the needs of students with disabilities.

Virtual Reality allows rapid prototyping and simulation of physical artefacts, which would be difficult and expensive to perform otherwise. On the other hand, when the design process is complex and involves multiple stakeholders, decisions are taken in meetings hosted in the physical world. In the case of aerospace industrial designs, the process is accelerated by having asymmetric collaboration between the two locations: experts discuss the possibilities in a meeting room while a technician immersed in VR tests the selected alternatives. According to experts, the current approach is not without limitations, and in this work, we present prototypes designed to tackle them. The described artefacts were created to address the main issues: awareness of the remote location, remote interaction and manipulation, and navigation between locations. First feedback from experts regarding the prototypes is also presented. The resulting design considerations can be used in other asymmetric collaborative scenarios.

We present a novel interaction technique called Immersive Navidget for navigation in immersive virtual environments (VE), see Figure 1. This technique, based on Navidget, allows fast and easy 3D camera positioning from simple controls. In this paper, we focus on the technical issues that are induced by the VR setups and we propose solutions to adapt Navidget to the immersive context. We show that this new approach has many advantages for navigation in immersive VEs.

Standard input devices for mobile phones are directional keys and discrete thumb-joysticks. These devices are dedicated to the discrete GUIs of the phones (eg. scroll lists and small icons arrays). Today, new mobile applications are arising and require adapted interfaces. In particular, the widespread of 3D applications will be favored if users can efficiently point on any part of thescreen. In this paper, we propose a new interaction technique called Jump and Refine for selection tasks on mobile phones. This technique is based on two levels of cursor displacement in order to reduce the number of keystrokes. The first level allows fast movements into an underlying grid. The second one can be used for accurate positioning into the selected area. We present a user study which shows that using a first coarse jump level decreases the selection completion times. The study also shows that the technique is widely accepted by the users. Finally, we discuss the optimal grid sizes.

Topographic paper maps are a common support for ge- ographical information. In the field of document analysis of this kind of support, this paper proposes an automatic approach to extract and recognize toponyms. We present a technique based on image segmentation and connected component processing. Different filtering stages ensure the consistency of plausible characters and strings. Detected text areas are used to feed an OCR software and the recog- nized words are analyzed and corrected. The main advan- tage of our technique is that no assumption is made about the character font, size or orientation. Experimental results obtained are encouraging in term of recognition efficiency.

3D interactive applications are now appearing on mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. Compared to classical desktop or immersive configurations, mobile devices induce several constraints that intrinsically limit the user performance in interactive tasks. Consequently, a special effort has to be made in order to adapt the classical 3D user interfaces to mobile settings. In this paper, we propose a new key-based technique that favors navigation in 3D environments. Compared to a classical "go to" approach, our technique called Z-Goto directly operates in the 3D space. This accelerates the user's displacements by reducing the number of required keystrokes. Moreover, the construction of the cognitive maps is improved, as Z-Goto favors depth perception. An experiment shows that Z-Goto obtains better completion times compared to a standard "go to" technique for a primed search task on mobile device. It also shows that the user satisfaction for this new technique is good.

Recent advances in mobile computing allow the users to deal with 3D interactive graphics on handheld computers. Although the computing resources and screen resolutions grow steadily, user interfaces for handheld computers do not change significantly. Consequently, we designed a new 3-DOF interface adapted to the characteristics of handheld computers. This interface tracks the movement of a target that the user holds behind the screen by analyzing the video stream of the handheld computer camera. The position of the target is directly inferred from the color-codes that are printed on it using an efficient algorithm. The users can easily interact in real-time in a mobile setting. The visualization of the data is good as the target does not occlude the screen and the interaction techniques are not dependent on the orientation of the handheld computer. We used the interface in several test applications for the visualization of large images such as maps, the manipulation of 3D models, and the navigation in 3D scenes. This new interface favors the development of 2D and 3D interactive applications on handheld computers.

We present the CAT (Control Action Table), a 6 degrees of freedom freestanding input device designed for interaction with Virtual Environments displayed on huge screens. Both isotonic and isometric sensing modes allow the user to easily and efficiently perform 3D interaction techniques. A 2D tablet fixed on the tabletop allows them to perform accurate 2D interaction techniques.

We present the first usable prototype of the CAT (Control Action Table). The CAT is a 6 degree of freedom freestanding device, mixing isotonic and isometric sensing modes. It allows a group of users to interact with virtual environments by means of 3D and 2D interaction techniques. The innovating design of the CAT unifies the principle advantages of existing input devices while rejecting their main limitations. We present the resulting characteristics and compare the CAT to existing input devices. A 3D docking task experiment and a demo application have shown that the CAT can be used more efficiently than an 3D isometric desktop device and that the users preferred the CAT. The CAT is contributing to the development of real VR applications.