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Advance human–machine interface automatic evaluation

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Abstract

The need for accessibility evaluation tools is motivated by several endogenous and exogenous reasons coming from the end user (the designer and the developer) and companies releasing information systems. Existing evaluation tools mainly concentrate on examining the code of Web pages: Web pages more and more frequently contain non-HTML parts that entirely escape from being treated by existing techniques. This is the case of the advanced human–machine interface (AHMI), a piece of software programmed in C/C++, used for controlling the advanced flight management system in the aircraft cockpit. Studying this new user interface (UI) requires a structured approach to evaluate and validate AHMI designs. The goal in this work is to develop an evaluation tool to automate the process of evaluating the AHMI. The method addresses: support of multiple bases of guidelines (accessibility or usability or both) on-demand (partial or total evaluation), with different levels of details (a presentation for developers and for those responsible for certifying accessibility). The method goes a step toward the automatic evaluation of UI containing non-HTML parts.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Human European project (Model-based Analysis of Human Errors during Aircraft Cockpit System Design, project funded by FP7-AAT-2007-RTD-1/CP-FP-211988 from European Commission), the ITEA2 Call 3 UsiXML project under reference 20080026, and Mexican PROMEP projects under reference 103.5/12/8136 and 103.5/12/4367.

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Correspondence to Juan Manuel González Calleros.

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González Calleros, J.M., Guerrero García, J. & Vanderdonckt, J. Advance human–machine interface automatic evaluation. Univ Access Inf Soc 12, 387–401 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-013-0310-7

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