Access to graphical images (bar charts, diagrams, line graphs, etc.) that are in a tactile form (representation through which content can be accessed by touch) is inadequate for students who are blind and take mathematics, science, and engineering courses. We describe our analysis of the current work practices of tactile graphics specialists who create tactile forms of graphical images. We propose automated means by which to improve the efficiency of current work practices.We describe the implementation of various components of this new automated process, which includes image classification, segmentation, simplification, and layout. We summarize our development of the tactile graphics assistant, which will enable tactile graphics specialists to be more efficient in creating tactile graphics both in batches and individually. We describe our unique team of researchers, practitioners, and student consultants who are blind, all of whom are needed to successfully develop this new way of translating tactile graphics.

The Web enables broad dissemination of information and services; however, the ways in which sites are designed can either facilitate or impede users' benefit from these resources. We present a longitudinal study of web site design from 2000 to 2003. We analyze over 150 quantitative measures of interface aspects (e.g., amount of text on pages, numbers and types of links, consistency, accessibility, etc.) for 22,000 pages and over 1,500 sites that received ratings from Internet professionals. We examine characteristics of highly rated sites and provide three perspectives on the evolution of web site design patterns: (1) descriptions of design patterns during each time period; (2) changes in design patterns across the three time periods; and (3) comparisons of design patterns to those that are recommended in the relevant literature (i.e., texts by recognized experts and user studies). We illustrate how design practices conform to or deviate from recommended practices and the consequent implications. We show that the most glaring deficiency of web sites, even for sites that are highly rated, is their inadequate accessibility, in particular for browser scripts, tables, and form elements.

Course Web sites are fast becoming standard features of college courses. Some students expect all their courses to have such sites, just like they expect them to have syllabi. Course Web sites help professors communicate with students and students communicate with each other. They might summarize lectures, present assignments, serve as repositories of examples developed by students as well as the professor, and provide links to additional related information on the Web.This panel will discuss various aspects of course Web sites, focusing on their development, maintenance, and use. We will share experiences by presenting examples, highlighting successes and failures, and describing our hopes and concerns for the future. The panel will welcome comments from those in the audience with similar and even contradictory experiences. Our intention is to broaden participants' thinking on the implementation and use of course Web sites and spawn insights that might lead to more effective use of this important course component.

We are creating an interactive tool to help non-professional web site builders create high quality designs. We have previously reported that quantitative measures of web page structure can predict whether a site will be highly or poorly rated by experts, with accuracies ranging from 67--80%. In this paper we extend that work in several ways. First, we compute a much larger set of measures (157 versus 11), over a much larger collection of pages (5300 vs. 1900), achieving much higher overall accuracy (94% on average) when contrasting good, average, and poor pages. Second, we introduce new classes of measures that can make assessments at the site level and according to page type (home page, content page, etc.). Finally, we create statistical profiles of good sites, and apply them to an existing design, showing how that design can be changed to better match high-quality designs.

A quantitative analysis of a large collection of expert-rated web sites reveals that page-level metrics can accurately predict if a site will be highly rated. The analysis also provides empirical evidence that important metrics, including page composition, page formatting, and overall page characteristics, differ among web site categories such as education, community, living, and finance. These results provide an empirical foundation for web site design guidelines and also suggest which metrics can be most important for evaluation via user studies. Keywords World Wide Web, Empirical Studies, Automated Usability Evaluation, Web Site Design INTRODUCTION There is currently much debate about what constitutes good web site design [19, 21]. Many detailed usability guidelines have been developed for both general user interfaces and for web page design [6, 16]. However, designers have historically experienced difficulties following design guidelines [2, 7, 15, 24]. Guidelines are often sta...

Abstract Over 25 implementations of different functional languages are benchmarked using the same program, a floating-point intensive application taken from molecular biology. The principal aspects studied are compile time and execution time for the various implementations that were benchmarked. An important consideration is how the program can be modified and tuned to obtain maximal performance on each language implementation. With few exceptions, the compilers take a significant amount of time to compile this program, though most compilers were faster than the then current GNU C compiler (GCC version 2.5.8). Compilers that generate C or Lisp are often slower than those that generate native code directly: the cost of compiling the intermediate form is normally a large fraction of the total compilation time. There is no clear distinction between the runtime performance of eager and lazy implementations when appropriate annotations are used: lazy implementations have clearly come of age when it comes to implementing largely strict applications, such as the Pseudoknot program. The speed of C can be approached by some implementations, but to achieve this performance, special measures such as strictness annotations are required by non-strict implementations. The benchmark results have to be interpreted with care. Firstly, a benchmark based on a single program cannot cover a wide spectrum of ‘typical’ applications. Secondly, the compilers vary in the kind and level of optimisations offered, so the effort required to obtain an optimal version of the program is similarly varied.