Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0
University of Southampton (ECS) (10/27/09) Lewis, Joyce
The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is launching a study that will explore how well people with disabilities can access Web services such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. The study, led by Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in ECS' Learning Societies Lab, is based on an accessibility toolkit that will enable users to test the accessibility of Web 2.0 services. The accessibility tools were developed as a result of the LexDis project, which identified strategies learners can use to enhance their e-learning experience. Part of the toolkit, Web2Access, provides an online checking system for any interactive Web-based service such as Facebook. Another key feature of the accessibility kit is Study Bar, which can work with all browsers and reads text out loud, spell checks, provides a dictionary, and can enlarge or change text fonts and colors to make text more readable. "We developed it because nowadays users contribute as well as read information and so you cannot just click on a button to see if Web sites are accessible and easy to use," Draffan says. Wald says it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of Web services.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Blog: Testing the Accessibility of Web 2.0
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Blog: Prizes Aside, the P-NP Puzzler Has Consequences
Prizes Aside, the P-NP Puzzler Has Consequences
New York Times (10/08/09) Markoff, John
The frenzy of downloading that accompanied the September cover article in the Communications of the ACM when it was issued online reflects the intense interest in the subject of the article--the progress, or lack thereof, on solving the P vs. NP challenge. P represents the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time, while NP represents the class of problems that can be confirmed in polynomial time. It is theorized that if P equals NP, some of the most complex real-world computing problems, such as optimizing the layout of transistors on a computer chip, could be addressed, triggering an acceleration of technological and economic productivity. Cracking computer codes raises a similar challenge. Such tasks share the common characteristic that an increase in the size of a problem is accompanied by an exponential increase in the computer time needed to solve it. Progress on meeting the P vs. NP challenge has been slow, but Lance Fortnow of the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University believes the theory might be proved or disproved through algebraic geometry.