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Ubiquitous access is an increasingly common vision of computing, wherein users can interact with any computing device or service from anywhere, at any time. In the era of personal computing, users with visual impairments required special-purpose, assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to interact with computers. This paper investigates whether technologies like screen readers have kept pace with, or have created a barrier to, the trend toward ubiquitous access, with a specific focus on desktop computing as this is still the primary way computers are used in education and employment. Towards that, the paper presents a user study with 21 visually-impaired participants, specifically involving the switching of screen readers within and across different computing platforms, and the use of screen readers in remote access scenarios. Among the findings, the study shows that, even for remote desktop access—an early forerunner of true ubiquitous access—screen readers are too limited, if not unusable. The study also identifies several accessibility needs, such as uniformity of navigational experience across devices, and recommends potential solutions. In summary, assistive technologies have not made the jump into the era of ubiquitous access, and multiple, inconsistent screen readers create new practical problems for users with visual impairments.

Acquiring and securing position information is of fundamental importance in vehicular ad hoc networks and their applications. Recently, it has been shown that securing position information can be achieved by enlisting the help of on-board radar devices that have seen a phenomenal penetration of the vehicular market. However, most on-board radar devices have a static range and this can cause a number of insecurities and can add to communication delay. The main contribution of this work is a novel low-cost radar model which can dynamically tune its range by changing the signal sample size. As it turns out, the dynamically-tunable radar considerably enhances position security.

Several secure distributed data mining methods have been proposed in the literature that are based on privacy preserving set operation mechanisms. However, they are limited in the scalability of both the size and the number of data owners (sources). Most of these techniques are primarily designed to work with two data owners and extensions to handle multiple owners are either expensive or infeasible. In addition, for large datasets, they incur substantial communication/computation overhead due to the use of cryptographic techniques. In this paper, we propose a scalable privacy-preserving protocol that approximates global itemset support, without employing any cryptographic mechanism. We also present some emperical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Speech-enabled dialogue systems have the potential to enhance the ease with which blind individuals can interact with the Web beyond what is possible with screen readers -the currently available assistive technology which narrates the textual content on the screen and provides shortcuts to navigate the content. In this paper, we present a dialogue act model towards developing a speech enabled browsing system. The model is based on the corpus data that was collected in a wizard-of-oz study with 24 blind individuals who were assigned a gamut of browsing tasks. The development of the model included extensive experiments with assorted feature sets and classifiers; the outcomes of the experiments and the analysis of the results are presented.

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