Colour can convey a mood or elicit a particular emotion and, in terms of web design, colour can influence attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours. However, many websites demonstrate inaccessible colour choices. Numerous online colour palette design tools only focus on assisting designers with either the aesthetics or accessibility of colours. With a user-centered design approach, we developed the Accessible Colour Evaluator (ACE, daprlab.com/ace) which enhances web developers’ and designers’ ability to balance aesthetic and accessibility constraints. We distributed an online questionnaire to 28 web developers and designers to understand their attitudes and utilisation of accessibility guidelines, as well as to gather initial design requirements for ACE. With this information, we created three low-fidelity paper prototypes that were used to create two high-fidelity prototypes. The high-fidelity prototypes were discussed with 4 web developers and designers during a design workshop, and their feedback was used to develop the final version of ACE. A comparative evaluation of ACE and three existing alternative tools was conducted with 10 new web developers and designers. All participants were able to complete a colour palette design task when using ACE and identified ACE as their most preferred tool. The mean scores for the six TLX measures show ACE as providing the best performance and causing the lowest frustration. Finally, we conducted a small focus group with 3 web developers and designers to gather qualitative feedback about ACE. Participants identified a number of ACE’s strengths and made suggestions for future extensions and improvements.

/pdf/ace-a-colour-palette-design-tool-for-balancing-aesthetics-inxfvd0skd.pdf

ACE: A Colour Palette Design Tool for Balancing Aesthetics and Accessibility

Mobile devices are a substantial part of our lives, supporting communication, work, and play. However, situational visual impairments (SVIs) can make completing tasks a challenge (e.g., browsing online in bright sunlight) and poorly designed content can cause or exacerbate SVIs. We surveyed 43 mobile content designers and ran four follow-on interviews to understand what designers currently do regarding SVIs, what resources they know of, and what is required to best support them in designing to reduce SVIs. Our findings highlight key similarities and differences between accessibility and designing to reduce SVIs. Our participants requested improved guidelines, education, and digital design tools for SVIs. To accommodate the growing number of people affected by SVIs and improve the inclusion of accessibility in design, we introduce recommendations that leverage the overlap between accessibility and SVIs to minimise the effort required in extending current design processes.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3196709.3196760

Designing for Situational Visual Impairments: Supporting Early-Career Designers of Mobile Content

Designers of digital content have access to various resources that they use to help them meet disabled people’s accessibility needs. Disability simulations are one resource, but often criticized for failing to guide digital designers appropriately, and it is unclear if digital designers are aware of the issues surrounding disability simulations. I surveyed 92 digital designers to understand their perspectives toward disability simulations (both perceived advantages and disadvantages). I then shared work process challenges faced by digital designers and their reasons for using disability simulations with 17 people with vision impairments to facilitate a discussion on this topic. The interviewees discussed ideas that suggest many paths can be explored to connect digital designers and disabled people, in general, to reduce reliance on simulations, and a change is needed within workplace processes, culture, and staffing to further support positive change. There are research opportunities to investigate establishing avenues for connecting digital designers and disabled people in a way that is beneficial to both groups.

Nuanced Perspectives Toward Disability Simulations from Digital Designers, Blind, Low Vision, and Color Blind People

We introduce, review and analyse recent research in Music and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), also known as Music Interaction. After a general overview of the discipline, we analyse the themes and issues raised by the other 15 chapters of this book, each of which presents recent research in this field. The bulk of this chapter is organised as an FAQ. Topics include: the scope of research in Music Interaction; the role of HCI in Music Interaction; and conversely, the role of Music Interaction in HCI. High-level themes include embodied cognition, spatial cognition, evolutionary interaction, gesture, formal language, affective interaction, and methodologies from social science. Musical activities covered include performance, composition, analysis, collaborative music making, and human and machine improvisation. Specific issues include: whether Music Interaction should be easy; what can be learned from the experience of being “in the groove”, and what can be learned from the commitment of musical amateurs. Broader issues include: what Music Interaction can offer traditional instruments and musical activities; what relevance it has for domains unconnected with music; and ways in which Music Interaction can enable entirely new musical activities.

/pdf/music-interaction-understanding-music-and-human-computer-4wjmz94w6g.pdf

Music Interaction: Understanding Music and Human-Computer Interaction

This article presents a proposal for avoiding accessibility errors in Web 2.0 contexts through a new concept of web editor that helps non-technical content writers to evaluate and repair accessibility errors. This proposal implements accessibility guidelines and pays special attention to communication issues following the semiotic engineering principles. The communication of accessibility errors is made through several disabled "personas" enabling the writer to empathize with the user through simulation tools. A proof-of-concept prototype was created and showed quite good results when tested on 8 users in comparison with a traditional evaluation tool.

Empathic communication of accessibility barriers in web 2.0 editing

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a new accessibility information resource, the Web Accessibility Information Resource (WebAIR), for assisting web developers in the creation of accessible websites and applications. Evaluations were conducted with 26 web developers in which they had opportunity to use both WebAIR and an existing accessibility information resource, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, to perform accessibility testing on their own websites. The results indicate that a number of design decisions relating to the language, organisation and comprehensiveness of WebAIR have been successful in improving access to web accessibility information that supports web developers’ practices.

Speaking the Language of Web Developers: Evaluation of a Web Accessibility Information Resource (WebAIR)

In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) use of the auditory channel normally involves communicating information to users in the form of short, auditory messages. Given the recent trend of HCI research towards incorporating experiential objectives, we propose that the auditory channel could also be exploited for affective intent. In particular, music could be integrated within interactive technologies as a vehicle to influence users’ behaviour and their experiences. This chapter describes some of the research conducted from other fields that already embrace the affective characteristic of music within their context. The limited amount of research exploiting music affectively in an HCI environment is discussed; including a review of our previous work involving Ambient Music Email (AME), an affective musical extension for email clients. By reflecting on how other subjects investigate the affective nature of music, this chapter aims to show that the HCI field is falling behind and inspire further work in this area. In fact, there are a wide variety of potential motivations for working with affective musical interaction, with a vast realm of potential research avenues, some of which are proposed here.

Affective Musical Interaction: Influencing Users’ Behaviour and Experiences with Music

Music psychologists have frequently shown that music affects people’s behaviour. Applying this concept to work-related computing tasks has the potential to lead to improvements in a person’s productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. This paper presents two quantitative experiments exploring whether transcription typing performance is affected when hearing a music accompaniment that includes vocals. The first experiment showed that classifying the typists as either slow or fast ability is important as there were significant interaction effects once this between group factor was included, with the accuracy of fast typists reduced when the music contained vocals. In the second experiment, a Dutch transcription typing task was added to manipulate task difficulty and the volume of playback was included as a between groups independent variable. When typing in Dutch the fast typists’ speed was reduced with louder music. When typing in English the volume of music had little effect on typing speed for either the fast or slow typists. The fast typists achieved lower speeds when the loud volume music contained vocals, but with low volume music the inclusion of vocals in the background music did not have a noticeable affect on typing speed. The presence of vocals in the music reduced the accuracy of the text entry across the whole sample. Overall, these experiments show that the presence of vocals in background music reduces typing performance, but that we might be able to exploit instrumental music to improve performance in tasks involving typing with either low or high volume music.

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Anna Bramwell-Dicks

Papers

Speaking the Language of Web Developers: Evaluation of a Web Accessibility Information Resource (WebAIR)

Affective Musical Interaction: Influencing Users’ Behaviour and Experiences with Music

Can Listening to Music Make You Type Better? The Effect of Music Style, Vocals and Volume on Typing Performance