Moodle

I was quite excited to find out that AbilityNet use Moodle to deliver their online training courses. I've had an idea about what Moodle was thanks to a case study of WebCT vs Moodle studied at one of my modules.

Many universities use WebCT/Blackboard system, which is proprietary, to create their virtual learning environments. I so far have some experience of two implementations of WebCT. Moodle , on the other hand, is open source, making it collaborative and very much in the spirit of web 2.0. Can't wait to have a play with it and tell you more.

The VISTA Project

An interesting piece of research was undertaken to create a virtual assistant (represented by a speaking avatar) for delivering the functions and contents of an electronic programmes guide (EPG) via speech. This research looked into manipulating the EPG (such as changing TV channels and enquiring about the times of a specific TV show) by the means of spoken commands from the viewer and responses from the virtual assistant, targeted at the Visually Impaired and the elderly.

Here's the link to a pdf of the VISTA project paper. The paper dates back to 2003 and it would be interesting to see if anything's been done in this field since then. The hot stuff comes in the Future Improvements part of the paper, concluding that more work would be needed to achieve a more personable virtual assistant, flexible dialogues and, ultimately, to meet the needs of diverse users.

Why Mobile Usability Matters?

Today Jon sent me a link to a really cool article on mobile usability by Webcredible.

The article outlines three major reasons why mobile web usability matters, perhaps even more so than computer usability:

1. Internet access from mobile devices is becoming more popular
2. In general, people have less experience of accessing the Internet from mobiles
3. The technology involved in accessing the web from a mobile phone is far more varied. The mobile web needs to cater for a greater variety of mobile operating systems and browsers.

The challenge is to remain user friendly while using the tiny keybords (of varying layout) as input and the tiny mobile screens (of varying resolution) as output.

A part of my task within the next six months will be to establish, how accessible mobile phones are and to come up with with a set of practical recommendations on improving the status quo.

Hello, World!

Hi everyone!

The purpose of this blog is to keep track of the things I do during my internship with AbilityNet. Just to give an idea - it will be about accessibility and technologies, such as mobile devices and digital TV.

Also, there's a inner geek part of me that at times feels like vocalising opinions regarding the latest technology. My secret dream is that one day the world will be covered by a ubiquitous, accessible wireless mushroom. Hence, most techs that I find hot are somehow related to fulfilling that dream of making the world a better place!


See ya!