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!
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.
This project started in September 2006, when I, Andrea Mangiatordi, started writing my thesis at the end of my second level degree in Communication and Multimedia Publishing.
It was developed with a particular person in mind, with only some features designed around her. Now she is still using it, and she finds it useful as a support to her studies.
Now Farfalla is the core of a Doctoral project, and even if nothing has changed in the original idea of working side by side with disabled people, something has changed in its purposes. The idea is now to provide a flexible instrument to access websites (and consequently, to send emails, compose documents, etc.) while giving the user the opportunity to choose between different instruments for accessing the pages. The already existing writing aid will become part of a family of instruments, which can include text-to-speech, vocal browsing and pointing device emulation.
With this new website I will try to keep the project development news and issues up to date. It is a blog, so I will post as often as possible while developing and doing research.
On the “screenshots” page you can find some mockups of what Farfalla could become some day…
