Last week I spent a lot of time writing code. The results were a better POST/GET variables management in the transmission of web forms and the totally experimental integration of the Festival Text-to-Speech engine.
This last feature makes Farfalla read aloud the contents of web pages. When the project will be stable, all this tools will be selectable in accordance with the specific needs of every user. Vocal browsing can be useful to people with visual impairments.
Go on readin “Yet another video demo”
Tag: — Andrea @ 12:55
A new Farfalla alpha is going to be released soon. As a preview, you can watch a short video illustrating the recently developed new features. It shows the navigation of a simple webpage and of an accessible website, including a Google search.
The video is available at the demo page.
Among the other features, farfalla includes a text prediction engine. Text prediction is one of the key issues to support users in many different fields, for example in the use of mobile phones.
Go on readin “The text prediction engine”
The idea of creating a browser-into-the-browser for Farfalla seems to be the best solution for accessibility: it will allow the rendering of webpages inside a sort of protected environment, where the pages themselves could be dinamically modified to meet the most basical accessibility requirements.
Go on readin “Some issues about web pages rendering”
I have been writing on this Wordpress blog for weeks, writing some code in the meantime. Now I think it is time to reveal what I have done to the rest of the world!
There are only three active pages besides the home page, but others are coming with docs, pictures and other downloads.
In the demo section you can now try a couple of working demos of the original project, but I will (hopefully) publish the rest of my work very soon. I am still working on the functionality which allows Farfalla to render web pages correctly and I will only release a new demo when this is fixed.
Any comment on these articles will be appreciated!
This is a scheme illustrating the future modular and multi-layer structure of Farfalla as I imagine it.
Go on readin “The software structure”
Last week I started writing some code for the new Farfalla release. As I decided to develop it like a browser-in-the-browser program, I started building a web page wrapper.In its present state, the program can only browse web pages, using a simple HTML form to enter website addresses instead of using the browser’s main navigation bar. This is the first implementation of the abstraction layer discussed before: it can change the way URLs are inserted, independently from the browser being used.From a technical point of view, this is possible thanks to the strong use of javascript for filtering mouse and keyboard events: every time a key is pressed it sends a code number to the web browser. Intercepting this code associates almost any action to the code number through javascript. This has a complication: key codes are not standardized among browsers, so the very difficult task will be to make every browser behave alike - this problem is well known as Cross Browser Compatibility.
Hypothesis on an accessible registration and configuration form
Recently I have been thinking about how a new user can configure his new account on an ipothetical Farfalla server.The best introduction to an accessibility program would be an accessible registration form, where the first login and configuration procedure should be simple and effective. I think the best interface for this would be a “multisensorial” one. A list of questions, both displayed on the screen and read by a synthetic voice, should be readily accessible for the major part of users.These questions should ask about the needs and the preferences of the new user, proposing useful combos of instruments: if someone chooses a scanning writing system, it would be useful for him to also have a word prediction system up and running. It would be useful, even if not mandatory: it only depends on one’s actual ability to move on the keyboard.This user configuration procedure should also be flexible: as Farfalla is meant to become a modular instrument, with the possibility offered to other developers to add new features, the configuration has also to be modular and it has to provide the developers with the possibility to simply add their options in a standardized way.
In my last post I wrote about the idea of an abstraction layer to be built in order to create a sort of common basis for further software modules. Let us discuss this idea here.
Go on readin “About abstraction”
At the beginning of every research project there should be a deep analysis. It includes listing down all the resources available, gathering information about the problem which has to be studied and possibly solved, defining the strategies to be followed in every future step.
The main resources for this project are:
- the precedent research experience with a disabled person, who has already contributed to the project in its earlier phase;
- some experience in web application development, with a special interest in accessibility and usability.
The main objective is to create a versatile instrument, so the “problem” will be seized in smaller parts. This will help to maintain it as flexible as possible. It would be useful to build a sort of abstraction layer between the hardware and the common software, for example between the keyboard and the web browser. This layer could act as an interpreter, translating inputs received from almost every source, which could be hardware or software as well. Some modular software aids could then be written, to emulate already-existing aids or to make new ones available.
Now the most important thing to do is to gather information from companies, research centers, associations and firms which already have experience in this topic.
Every point of this post will be discussed more in depth in the following posts.
