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Web Adaptation Technology
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Technology workers, take heart! The demographic shift is fast approaching — the first “Baby Boomers” turn 60 in 2006 — but so are innovative solutions to assist Boomers who want to remain active in the workplace. Thanks to teamwork led by Dr. Vicki Hanson, a manager and research staffer at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, many computer-related challenges are getting a lot easier.
And it’s not only older workers who will benefit from Hanson’s innovations. These days, as Hanson and her team explore ways to enhance Web accessibility, they’re finding that their work can eliminate barriers for populations of all ages. Now their focus also includes young students as well as older people with limited sensory, physical, or cognitive abilities.
Hanson’s team has developed new ways to help users with dyslexia, and other learning disabilities, for example. Web page features the team originally targeted for older adults — such as eliminating movement on the screen, reducing text density and adding the ability to have the page read aloud — benefit users of all ages.
Hanson and her team developed a software program that exhibits flexibility and simple interactivity. The interface includes a "settings" button on the toolbar that opens a control band at the bottom of the browser. When a user clicks the "wider" tab in the control band, for example, the Web page expands the space between lines of text. All selected adaptations will automatically apply to subsequently viewed Web pages.
Along with the human benefits, Hanson’s work also expands technology and business opportunities. “Many of the accessibility features we developed for Internet Explorer, we are developing for the open-source browser, Firefox, which runs on multiple platforms,” she says. “The accessibilityWorks project with Firefox comprises accessibility extensions designed to meet the needs of a variety of Web users.”
“Other applications we are exploring include mouse correction for some of the most common clicking errors that people make, plus using computer vision technology for tasks such as cursor movement.”
Hanson is Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS) and was named an ACM Fellow in 2004. Among her many patents and awards, Hanson received the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for the team’s Contributions to Accessibility in 2003.
