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Menu controller: making existing software more accessible for people with motor impairments

Published: 25 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Menu Controller was developed to make existing software more accessible for people with severe motor impairments, especially individuals who use mouse-replacement input systems. Windows applications have menus that are difficult to access by users with limited muscle control, due to the size and placement of the menu entries. The goal of Menu Controller is to take these entries and generate customizable user interfaces that can be catered to the individual user. Menu Controller accomplishes this by harvesting existing menu items without needing to change any existing code in these applications and then by displaying them to the user in an external toolbar that is more easily accessible to people with impairments. The initial challenge in developing Menu Controller was to find a method for harvesting and re-displaying menu items by using the Windows API. The rest of the work involved exploring an appropriate way for displaying the harvested menu entries. We ultimately chose an approach based on a two-level sliding toolbar. Experiments with a user with severe motor impairments, who used the Camera Mouse as a mouse-replacement input system, showed that this approach was indeed promising. The experiments also exposed areas that need further research and development. We suggest that Menu Controller provides a valuable contribution towards making everyday software more accessible to people with disabilities.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Methodological Standards in Accessibility Research on Motor Impairments: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/354350955:7(1-35)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2021)Computer Vision applied to improve interaction and communication of people with motor disabilities: A systematic mappingTechnology and Disability10.3233/TAD-20030833:1(11-28)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2021
  • (2014)Adaptive sliding menubars make existing software more accessible to people with severe motion impairmentsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-013-0295-213:1(5-22)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
PETRA '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
May 2011
401 pages
ISBN:9781450307727
DOI:10.1145/2141622
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • NSF: National Science Foundation
  • Foundation of the Hellenic World
  • ICS-FORTH: Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas
  • U of Tex at Arlington: U of Tex at Arlington
  • UCG: University of Central Greece
  • Didaskaleio Konstantinos Karatheodoris, University of the Aegean
  • Fulbrigh, Greece: Fulbright Foundation, Greece
  • Ionian: Ionian University, GREECE

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 May 2011

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. assistive software
  3. camera mouse
  4. human computer interaction
  5. user interfaces
  6. video-based interfaces

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  • Research-article

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PETRA '11
Sponsor:
  • NSF
  • ICS-FORTH
  • U of Tex at Arlington
  • UCG
  • Fulbrigh, Greece
  • Ionian

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Methodological Standards in Accessibility Research on Motor Impairments: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/354350955:7(1-35)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2021)Computer Vision applied to improve interaction and communication of people with motor disabilities: A systematic mappingTechnology and Disability10.3233/TAD-20030833:1(11-28)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2021
  • (2014)Adaptive sliding menubars make existing software more accessible to people with severe motion impairmentsUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-013-0295-213:1(5-22)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2014
  • (2011)Adaptive Mouse-Replacement Interface Control Functions for Users with DisabilitiesUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Users Diversity10.1007/978-3-642-21663-3_36(332-341)Online publication date: 2011

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