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...broad range of computer-mediated human activities and access to a multitude of services and applications. Such systems are based on the distribution of computers and networks in physical environments and are expected to exhibit increasingly intelligent and context-sensitive behavior. A general description of the direction of anticipated technological development can be found in Reference 1, where a vision of ambient intelligence is offered:
The concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) provides a vision of the information society, where the emphasis is on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user empowerment, and support for human interactions. People are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces that are embedded in all kinds of objects and an environment that is capable of recognising and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive, and often invisible way.
The main high-level design requirements of a system with ambient intelligence are that it be unobtrusive (i.e., many distributed devices are embedded in the environment, not intruding upon our consciousness unless we need them), personalized (i.e., it can recognize the user, and its behavior can be tailored to the user's needs), adaptive (i.e., its behavior can change in response to a person's actions and environment), and anticipatory (i.e., it anticipates a person's desires and environment as much as possible without mediation).
Although it is not yet clear how the ambient intelligence environment is to be realized and shaped, it has become increasingly common to conceive of its evolution in relation to some general development trends that have already started to materialize, and that are likely to become common attributes of the emerging information society:
* Services are dynamic and can be reconfigured or recombined at runtime to accommodate the needs of different users in different contexts and environments;
* There is no clear distinction between interpersonal communication and access to information; different components, using different media, are interconnected to allow a free intermixing of these functions;
* Services are highly interactive, and interaction is complex in terms of the functionality offered, input required, output provided, dialog structure, and configuration capabilities;
* Most services utilize multimedia content, providing information in multiple media types (e.g., sound, graphics, video, text, animation, etc.) simultaneously and in an integrated manner;
* Interaction is often multimodal, using different sensorial and motor abilities concurrently, and is based on more natural forms of dialog;
* Communication and access to information are concurrently used to solve common problems in a cooperative manner. Moreover, cooperation may take place among human users themselves or among user representatives (agents and avatars), to whom variable degrees of trust can be assigned; and
* Computing is progressively more social. Access to information and communication are no longer the task of an individual and a contact between two people, respectively, but extend to communities of users, who have at their disposal common (sometimes virtual) spaces in which they can interact.
The evolution towards AmI is likely to bring about new opportunities, but, at the same time, new challenges for access to computer-based products and services by people with disabilities. In this dynamically evolving technological environment, accessibility and usability of such complex systems by users with different characteristics and requirements cannot be addressed through ad hoc assistive technology solutions introduced after the main building components of the new environment are in place. Instead, there is a need for more proactive approaches, based on a "design for all" philosophy, (2,3) along with the requirement of redefining the role and scope of assistive technologies in the new environment. In such a context, the concepts of universal access and design for all acquire critical importance in facilitating the incorporation of accessibility in the new technological environment through generic solutions.
This paper, after briefly introducing the concepts of universal access and design for all, discusses the benefits and challenges that the emergence of ambient intelligence environments are anticipated to bring about for user groups with diverse characteristics, needs, and requirements, including users with disabilities. The paper subsequently outlines some of the research and development issues that arise in providing universal access to ambient-intelligence technologies and environments. We focus on the need to take into account global contexts of use in forming and envisaging ambient-intelligence applications, and to do so proactively.
UNIVERSAL ACCESS AND DESIGN FOR ALL
Universal access (2,3) implies the accessibility and usability of information technologies by anyone at any place and at any time. Universal access aims to enable equitable access and active participation of potentially all people in existing and emerging computer-mediated human activities by developing universally accessible and usable products and services. These products and services must be capable of accommodating individual user requirements in different contexts of use, independent of location, target machine, or runtime environment.
Traditional approaches to computer accessibility are usually associated with access to interactive computer-based systems by people with disabilities. In these efforts, the main direction followed has been to enable users who are disabled to access interactive applications originally designed and developed for nondisabled users by adding assistive technologies, that is, introducing a posteriori adaptations.
Traditionally, two main technical approaches to adaptation have been followed: product-level adaptation and environment-level adaptation. The former involves treating each application separately and taking all the necessary implementation steps to arrive at an alternative accessible version. In practical terms, product-level adaptation often implies redevelopment practically from scratch. Due to the high costs associated with this strategy, it is considered the least favorable option for providing alternate access. The alternative involves intervening at the level of the particular interactive application environment (e.g., Microsoft Windows ** or the X windowing system) in order to provide appropriate software and hardware technology to make that environment alternatively accessible. Environment-level adaptation extends the scope of accessibility to cover potentially all applications running under the same interactive environment, rather than a single application, and is therefore considered a superior strategy. In the past, the vast majority of approaches to environment-level adaptation have focused on access to graphical environments by blind users. (4) Through such efforts, it became apparent that any approach to environment-level adaptation should be based on well-documented and operationally reliable software infrastructures, supporting effective and efficient extraction of dialog primitives during user-computer interaction. Such dynamically extracted dialog primitives are to be reproduced, at runtime, in alternative I/O forms, directly supporting user access. Recent examples of software infrastructures that satisfy these requirements are the Active Accessibility ** technology from Microsoft Corporation, and the Java ** accessibility technology, from Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Despite recent progress, the prevailing practices aiming to provide alternative access systems, either at the product or environment level, have been criticized for their essentially reactive nature. (5,6) Although the reactive approach to accessibility may be the only viable solution in certain cases, (7) it suffers from some serious shortcomings, especially when considering the radically changing technological environment, and, in particular, the information technologies. The argument is based on two observations. The first is that reactive solutions typically provide limited and low-quality access. This is evident in the context of nonvisual interaction, where the need has been identified to provide nonvisual user interfaces that go beyond automatically generated adaptations of visual dialogs. (8) Additionally, in some cases, adaptations may not be possible without loss of functionality.
The second observation concerns the practical and economic feasibility of the reactive approach to accessibility. Reactive approaches, based on a posteriori adaptations, while important in partially solving some of the accessibility problems of people with disabilities, are not viable in sectors of the industry characterized by rapid technological change. By the time a particular access problem has been addressed, technology has advanced to a point where the same or a similar problem occurs again. The typical example is the case of access to computers by blind users. Each generation of technology (e.g., DOS environment, windowing systems, and multimedia) caused a new generation of accessibility problems for blind users, addressed through dedicated techniques, such as text-to-speech translation for the DOS (disk operating system) environment, off-screen models, and...
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