Topic 4: Interaction and Accessibility

Fri Nov 8 (Hervanta Campus, Tietotalo, TB104): Interaction and Accessibility

Maija Hirvonen: Using User Potential in Accessibility: Shared Cognition in Interaction

Designing and implementing accessible services requires an understanding of the users of those services. Users can be involved in different ways, for instance via usability tests and feedback, but they can also participate in the production process. In my talk, I will illustrate how representatives of the visually impaired audience play a role in the teamwork of creating audio descriptions for film and television programs. I will present the valuable insight and the versatile expertise they bring into the collaborative translation process. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the social interaction shows how the teams think together and share the cognitive work required to solve problems.

Markku Turunen: Accessibity in Human-Technology Interaction and Technology Mediated Communication

Human-technology interaction studies how humans interact with technology, including technology-mediated human-human interaction. From accessibility perspective, solutions developed and studied in this field address needs of many different user groups. For example, people with special needs, such as hard-of-hearing people and people with visual impairments are often early adopters of novel technology solutions, such as speech, gaze, and haptic interfaces. Other users for accessible human-technology interaction solutions include children, elderly, and low-literate users, for example. In this presentation, I’ll show some concrete examples from our work with different accessibility solutions.

 

CANCELLED –  Camilla Lindholm: Dementia, language and interaction

In the field of humanities research, there is still a lack of initiatives resulting in practical application of research. This talk presents a case of research and its practical applications. The findings are based on long-term research into dementia, language and interaction conducted in Swedish-language care settings in Finland. Drawing on a corpus of videotaped interactions and utilizing the method of conversation analysis, the research demonstrated the importance of both verbal and non-verbal (e.g., gaze, posture, gesture) details for the outcome of interaction. It is demonstrated how these research findings can be utilized in creating educational materials for conversational partners of persons with dementia.