Collaborative Cross Modal Interfaces

We live in an information society where multiple methods of communication are commonplace. The rapid advancements in Information Communication Technologies (ICT) over the last few years has led to new methods of communication; both socially and professionally. This technology has allowed collaboration to become a cornerstone of problem solving through enabling people to work together with ease, despite being geographically apart. The improvement in ICT has also increased the inclusion of people who have perceptual impairments, for example, text messaging allows a person with hearing impairments to communicate relatively easily on their mobile phone. There is still, however, much work needed in the area of technology that allows collaborative communication between people who have differing perceptual awareness. In this project we will examine this important issue by addressing the challenge: How do we design support for collaboration where participants have differing access to modalities?Specifically, we will look at collaboration between visually impaired users and sighted users in the context of editing diagrams in the software engineering workplace. The deliverable for this project is an open-source software tool that enables collaborative diagram editing between visually impaired and sighted users.To do this, we will draw on a pilot study undertaken by the authors which demonstrates that auditory access to diagrams created in a collaborative context, in conjunction with shared auditory awareness mechanisms, supports participants in non-visual collaborative diagram editing and construction. The project will enlist the assistance of two project partners who have experience in this area (Royal National Institute of Blind People and British Computer Association of the Blind). The partners will assist in the recruitment of the user groups and sit on the steering committee. The user group studies will be carried out 'in the wild' to ensure the improvements are relevant. The feedback from the user studies will allow us to add appropriate haptic and auditory components, producing a user centric software tool. This tool will be released as an open-source resource and we will make the findings of our studies available to both academic and practitioner communities. The results of this project will broaden inclusion in the workplace and give the UK an advantage in the area of assistive technology. As the ageing population increases, so does the need for assistive technology, the software produced from this project will be contributing towards both inclusion in work based collaboration as well as social and creative collaboration. This project will also lead to further work such as creating software plug-ins and addressing the area of assistive collaborative technology in the teaching environment.

Software engineers with sensory impairments will feel immediate impact from this research as we will provide a tool to support collaborative design where participants have differing access to modalities. We will achieve this by distributing our tool as open-source, and providing online documentation of the tool. Participants in the studies involved in the project will get first hand experience of the tool, as will attendees at the events that we will exhibit at. We will also nurture a community of early adopters of the tool to help promote the tool after the end of the project. In the medium term, we hope that our work will be developed beyond the software engineering domain to support people with sensory impairments in a range of collaborative design domains. Our plan is that the community of early adopters, our public dissemination about our research, and our own follow on funding plans will support divergence into a wider set of domains. In the longer term, the people with sensory impairments in all walks of life will benefit from our research by being able to collaborate with others through cross-modal interaction. Publicising the research through media such as the BBC and the New Scientist will raise awareness of the possibilities of such tools with the general public, and may help to secure future funding to develop general purpose cross-modal tools. The project will create immediate commercial impact for companies with software engineering teams as it will increase the efficiency and inclusion of the workforce. Our open-source tool will be introduced to commercial companies through showcases and commercially focussed publicity. In the medium term, educational establishments will benefit from being able to teach in cross-modal environments, for example where teachers and students have differing access to modalities. We will support this by engaging with specialist educational establishments towards the end of the project to identify possible routes for our tool into the educational realm. In the longer term the project will have economic benefit to the UK as it will allow a wider range of people to engage in collaborative work, hence increasing opportunity and productivity. The project will also create impact by improving the UK's position in the assistive technology market, and making the UK an example of best practice in the field.