This article reports a unified methodology developed to evaluate the accessibility and usability of mobile computing applications, which is intended to guarantee universal access as far as possible. As a basis for the methodology, this paper presents an analysis of the accessibility guidelines, conducted to take into account the specificity of mobile systems, as well as a set of usability heuristics, specifically devised for mobile computing. Finally, it presents the results of the application of the proposed methodology to applications that have been semiautomatically developed by the MAIS Designer, a new design tool that provides applications suited to different mobile devices

consider relevant to the design. For an application related to tourism in a national park, the relevant persons may be first-time users, experienced users, children, parents, people between 15 and 18 years old, people over 30 years old, people with fast connections, people with slow connections, people who are not familiar with the technology, people with visual disabilities, hearingimpaired individuals, students, foreign tourists, first-time-visitor tourists, etc. Persons may be defined along any orthogonal dimension (e.g., site knowledge, family relationship, level of disability, age, domain expertise, or occupation) that contains user characteristics. A user profile aggregates a meaningful set of multidimensional characteristics, which tentatively describe a potential visitor to the application.The requirements analysis should reason carefully about the user's goals, which should be plausible motivations for visiting the application, or the objectives of their interaction. The user's goals may vary in granularity from low-level, specific information seeking ("find the opening hours of the park on day X"), called functional goals, to higher-level, open-ended, ill-defined needs or expectations ("decide whether the city is worth visiting"), called soft goals [76].Goal identification should also allow one to define the overall purpose of combining different communication channels, the definition and selection of the types of channel (mobile phone, PDA, interactive TV, kiosk, Website, etc.), the role played by each channel in the communication strategy, and the specific goals envisioned for each channel. Analyzing Goals and Using ScenariosAWARE adopts a refinement process to pass from all the stakeholders' (including the users') high-level goals to subgoals and, eventually, to application requirements. The raw material gathered during elicitation may consist of an unstructured mix of very high-level goals, pieces of design, examples of other sites, design ideas and sketches, design decisions, and detailed requirements. This first set of raw material must somehow be organized in order to be usable by analysts, and fed into design. The analysis of such material may be guided by the following lines of inquiry:

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Emerging intelligent environments are considered to offer significant opportunities to positively impact human life, both at an individual and at a societal level, and in particular to provide useful means to support people in their daily life activities and thus improve well-being for everybody, especially for older people and for people with limitations of activities. In this context, accessibility and usability, although necessary, are not sufficient to ensure that applications and services are appropriately designed to satisfy human needs and overcome potential functional limitations in the execution of everyday activities fundamental for well-being. This position paper puts forward the claim that, in order to achieve the above objective, it is necessary that: (i) the design of Assistive Intelligent Environments is centered around the well-being of people, roughly intended as the possibility of executing the (everyday) human activities necessary for living (independently), thus emphasizing usefulness in addition to usability; (ii) the technological environment is orchestrated around such activities and contains knowledge about how they are performed and how people need to be supported to perform them; (iii) the environment makes use of monitoring and reasoning capabilities in order to adapt, fine-tune and evolve over time the type and level of support provided, and this process takes place considering ethical values; (iv) the applications must also support the possibility of contact with other people, who in many cases may be the only effective help. Moving forward from the Design for All paradigm, this paper discusses how the latter can be revisited under the perspective of technology’s usefulness and contribution to human well-being. Subsequently, it introduces a practical notion of well-being based on the ICF classification of human functions and activities and discusses how such notion can constitute the starting point and the focus of design approaches targeted to assist people in their everyday life mainly (but not exclusively) in the home environment. As a subsequent step, the need for integrating Artificial Intelligence capabilities in assistive intelligent environments is discussed, based on the complexity of the human problems to be addressed and the diversity of the types of support needed. The proposed approach is exemplified and illustrated through the experience acquired in the development of four applications, addressing vital aspects of human life, namely nutrition, stress management, sleep management and counteracting loneliness. Finally, based on the acquired experience, the need to take into account ethical values in the development of assistive intelligent environments is discussed.

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Ambient Intelligence (AmI) scenarios place strong emphasis on the fact that interaction takes place through natural interfaces, in such a way that people can perceive the presence of smart objects only when needed. As a possible solution to achieving relaxed and enjoyable interaction with the intelligent environments depicted by AmI, the ambient could be equipped with suitably designed multimodal interfaces bringing up the opportunity to communicate using multiple natural interaction modes. This paper discusses challenges to be faced when trying to design multimodal interfaces that allow for natural interaction with systems, with special attention to speech-based interfaces. It describes an application that was built to serve as a test bed and to conduct evaluation sessions in order to ascertain the impact of multimodal natural interfaces on users and to assess their usability and accessibility.

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