Integration of a Regular Application into a User Interface Adaptation Engine in the MyUI Project

Abstract

Abstract. Software development is increasingly focusing its design on users suffering from different kinds of disabilities or impairments, as it is the case for the elderly or handicapped people for instance. Real-time adaptable graphical user interfaces is a promising solution for designing accessible applications for users with special needs. Essentially, collecting context information and combining it with information about the user can be used to customize the content of the interface itself, and so it allows improving the user experience in his interaction with the application.The EU-funded FP7 MyUI project has emerged in the adaptive graphical interfaces domain, addressing important barriers which include the developers' lack of awareness and expertise, time and cost requirements of incorporating accessibility and missing validated approaches and infrastructures of accesible software design. This paper presents the technology used and the experiences collected in the integration process of a regular application into such a framework.Keywords: Adaptation, user interfaces, accessibility, elderly, disabilities, user profiling. IntroductionThe EU-funded FP7 MyUI project combines several elements for building a framework that enables the creation of adaptable user interfaces in a drag-and-drop manner. The MyUI framework architecture is divided into three essential parts: the user model, the context manager and the adaptation engine. Basically, the adaptation engine uses the information collected by the context manager (which in turn uses the information from the user models) for creating a real-time adaptive interface.Such an adaptive interface is built up by combining multiple modular "Interaction Patterns", along with an Adaptation Engine which decides which patterns are more suitable for a user, based on the contextual information collected from that particular user. Such interaction patterns translate into HTML code that allows a customized visualization of the application. For instance, if a user suffers from low vision, the adaptaiton Engine may decide to display the context with a larger font-size than for

Adaptive User Interfaces for People with Cognitive Disabilities within the Easy Reading Framework

“…MyUI on the other hand was an EU funded project that enabled the generation of individualized user interfaces that would adapt to the individual users needs in real-time, based on a user profile and the actual device [ 10 , 12 , 13 ].…”