Prof. Giorgio Brajnik

Automatic observatories for web accessibility: effectiveness issues

Zum Vortrag:

At the moment in Italy and in the EU there are several observatories for accessibility that are in production or under development. All of them have the potential of affecting decisions taken by web developers, web sites managers, accessibility tools makers. However seldom effectiveness and quality issues underlying these projects are discussed in depth.

The seminar will provide an overview of several aspects underlying development and deployment of such automatic monitoring systems. In particular:

• why such monitoring tools should be useful, and to whom
• what kind of observatories do already exist
• what are the general requirements of such observatories
• what are the most important open issues, concerned with spidering and collecting pages to monitor, with identifying their defects, mixing automatic and human-based means, and with ranking identified defects
• show some initial steps with respect to an observatory for Italian, Austrian and German public web sites (respectively Italian regions, Austrian and German states)

Zur Person:

Giorgio Brajnik is assistant professor at the University of Udine, where he teaches and does research on usability and accessibility of web applications. His current interests are on methods, techniques and tools for managing accessibility; in particular he's focussing on evaluating different methods for assessing accessibility, and on applying data mining techniques to improve the effectiveness and usefulness of automatic tools.

In the past he has worked with leading companies in the field of accessibility testing (he is a co-founder of Usablenet Inc. where he was chief software designer, has worked with Macromedia on Dreamweaver extensions, and developed a Usablenet product with Nielsen Norman Group ). Past activities include research with the Qualitative Simulation group at the University of Texas at Austin (implementation and evaluation of a semi-quantitative simulator for nonlinear dynamical systems; specification of a temporal logic applied to phase-space trajectories of nonlinear dynamical systems) and work on intelligent user interfaces for information retrieval systems.

More details are available at http://www.dimi.uniud.it/giorgio/vitae.html

Sprecher/in: Prof. Giorgio Brajnik, Università di Udine
Wann:     Freitag,  27. Jänner 2006, 14:00 Uhr (s.t.)
Wo:       E.1.42, Universität Klagenfurt