Farfalla project

Are you a developer? A software engineer? A free software lover? 

Do you know people with disability or are yourself disabled and want to participate in building an Assistive Technology tool?

Are you interested in developing something new and (hopefully) interesting in the area of computer related Assistive Technology?

Well, if you belong to one of this categories, or to more than one, or if you know someone who could be interested, or if you have ideas and suggestions, please tell by email. 

The main goal is to release a stable web based platform for developing and distributing Assistive Technology on the web and for the web.

This is a serious call for developers. The Farfalla project and the Farfalla team need help.

The Farfalla project is at the core of my PhD project. Last year in July a possibility was offered to me to spend some time doing research and experiments abroad. 

Thanks to Paolo Ferri, Antonio Battro and Mónica Báez I am now in Uruguay to take part in the Ceibal plan: I will start working at LATU next monday together with an accessibility expert.

The Ceibal plan is delivering XO laptops from the OLPC project to primary school children in Uruguay. My idea is to optimize Farfalla for the XO laptop browser and hardware, so that it could be useful to disabled children but also to everyone using the machine in its ebook mode.

By now, I added a text-enlargement feature and integrated this javascript-based virtual keyboard. The interface was graphically redesigned to meet the Sugar graphical theme.

A screenshot showing the laptop.org webpage opened using Farfalla

The Farfalla project was presented at the World Summit on the Knowledge Society on September 26th, 2008. The paper, printed by Springer, is available here.

Many thanks to Miltos Lytras for his warm welcome!

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”

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.