PowerUp is a multi-player virtual world educational game with a broad set of accessibility features built in. This paper considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by individuals with a range of perceptual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. The accessibility features were included in the PowerUp game and validated, to date, with blind and partially sighted users. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. We discuss user requirements gathering, the validation study, and further work needed.

Loops is a text-based computer mediated communication system aimed at small- to medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design, particularly its treatment of non-conversational text. Next we describe its realization in an implemented system, and discuss how an early working version of the system was'group tested,' and the changes that lead to. We then discuss its deployment within our organization, and provide examples of how it's used. We conclude with reflections on the usage patterns of Loops and their implications for the design of similar systems.

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.

In this paper, we discuss issues in design and usability of the IBM Computer Sciences Electronic Magazine (CSEM). The CSEM is an interactive multimedia translation of a paper magazine. It contains articles describing Computer Sciences projects at the four IBM Research Labs. Combining aspects from print, television, and computers, it is a useful vehicle for studying what we see as a completely new communication medium. We report both our design rationale in creating the magazine and the results of several user studies which helped us understand our successes and failures. These studies are a part of an iterative process through which we have redesigned and improved the CSEM.

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