giorgio
@dimi.uniud.it
@dimi.uniud.itSee my Google Scholar list of papers.
Go to a chronological list of papers.
My primary interest is in design principles and practical methods and tools for designing effective information access systems, like web sites.
To be effective, information access systems have to comply to a lot of criteria, including: usability, accessibility, security; they have also to evoke the desired emotions and phsychological effects. It is no wonder that many web sites fail to be effective. Some of the projects listed below aim at sheding some light on these aspects.
The book [53] focus on basic principles underlying design and analysis of web sites and applications.
My most recent work focusses on methods for measuring accessibility levels of highly dynamic and large web sites. SAMBA is a semi-automatic methodology for measuring levels of accessibility, where accessibility is assumed to be related to the effectiveness with which people with disablities can use a website. SAMBA combines output produced by a testing tool with human judgment (on just a sample of the output) to yield an overall index of accessibility that considers severity of the barriers and error rates of tools.
[52] describes preliminary ideas about a practical accessibility metrics, further refined and tested in [56]. [54] describes an experimental comparison between different metrics. [59] describes MAMBO, a procedure for measuring web accessibility that is based only on human assessments of accessibility.
A recent research project deals with evaluating quality of web accessibility guidelines. In the study described in [66] we experimentally tested WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 with respect to validity (the extent to which all and only the true guideline violations are found) and to reliability (the extent to which independent evaluators produce the same results). The test, performed with 35 junior web developers minimally experienced with accessibility, suggests that
The file experiment-assets09.zip contains the raw data produced in the experiment and used to compute the results discussed in the paper.
Usability, accessibility and security are three basic components of the quality of a website. High levels of quality can only be achieved if proper organization, work processes and tools for usability and accessibility are deployed.
The goal of this research is (1) to define key processes that are necessary to achieve high level of quality in website development, (2) to understand the role of automatic tools to be used in such processes, and (3) to determine methods for assessing the level of quality of a website.
Papers: a comparison method for effectiveness of testing tools [40]; a paper describing quality assurance processes [42]; two papers on quality models [39, 38]; a paper on how to validate a quality model [35]; and a survey on web usability testing tools [34]. [57] experimentally compares different sampling methods and their effects on accessibility assessments.
Full details of the barrier walkthrough method are available.
See a study on effectiveness of the barrier walkthrough method for assessing web accessibility.
Text-only pages are normally considered as second-level pages for second-level web surfers. However well-implemented text-only pages might be an opportunity rather than a hindrance.
The goals of this research is (1) to determine if and for whom, text-only pages are useful; (2) to understand what aspects of text-only pages make them more attractive and pleasant. In particular the research is focusing on determining effectiveness, productivity, satisfaction and emotional effects of text-only pages with respect to users that are disabled or that use PDAs.
Papers: a discussion of pros and con's of text-only pages produced on the fly [41], and experimental evaluations with respect to disabled people and users of PDAs: [43], [47], [49].
Please see the biosketch.
@dimi.uniud.it