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Participation of Lourdes Moreno in the "Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility Research Symposium" of the W3C, in the panel "Natural Language Processing for Accessible Communication"

Participation of Lourdes Moreno in the "Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility Research Symposium" of the W3C, in the panel "Natural Language Processing for Accessible Communication"

On January 10 and 11, the "Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Accessibility Research Symposium" was held, within the framework of the W3C WAI initiative with the project "Communities of Practice (WAI-CooP) the W3C Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group”.

This symposium brought together researchers to identify current challenges and opportunities posed by the increasing use of AI in relation to accessibility and to explore how ongoing research can leverage and improve accessibility.

There were different panels related to AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology applied to accessibility challenges such as computer vision for accessibility in media, PLN for accessibility in media, machine learning for the evaluation of web accessibility, and PLN for accessible communication. In addition, there were talks by the great accessibility experts Jutta Treviranus and Shari Trewin.

Lourdes Moreno participated in the PLN and communication panel, introducing the most widely used language models today. In addition, he spoke about the use of PLN methods to improve accessibility in communication through the task of simplifying texts to clear language and easy reading, as well as the task of generating summaries as an accessibility resource to be able to access relevant information from long and tedious texts.  She identified challenges such as avoiding and correcting for disability bias in the datasets that algorithms learn from in order to avoid disadvantages to people with disabilities. In addition, she spoke about the lack of resources such as corpora and dictionaries in the field of accessibility prepared by accessibility experts and the participation of people with cognitive disabilities. Finally, she pointed out the few language resources in Spanish compared to English. She introduced the EASIER corpus created by the HULAT group within the framework of the EASIER project as an example of good practice. This corpus has been prepared by experts in easy reading and with the participation of people with intellectual disabilities and the elderly.

Organizers will publish a report with the conclusions and findings.

Hulat Group collaborates in the Guide "Curricular training in Accessibility and design for all in Technical Degrees related to ICT"

With the aim of improving the inclusion of accessibility and Design for All (DfA) in ICT university studies, the Royal Board on Disability and the ONCE Foundation have published the guide "Curricular training in Accessibility and Design for all people in Technical Degrees related to ICT“.

This guide guides teachers and professors in the design of subjects and the preparation of degree verification reports, and also as a reference for quality agencies and universities during the accreditation and quality assurance processes.

For the preparation of this guide, we have had the collaboration of expert professors in accessibility from the university, such as the case of Lourdes Moreno from the HULAT group of the UC3M Department of Computer Science.

In addition, as an example of good practices, the subject "Accessibility and design for all in software engineering" is included, in the Degree in Computer Science, from UC3M coordinated by Lourdes Moreno.

 

2022

"Navidad Accesible Madrid" app for people with disabilities

For the third consecutive year, the Madrid City Council, through the "Dirección General de Accesibilidad del Área de Obras y Equipamientos", together with the "Universidad Carlos III de Madrid", has made it possible for all people, especially those with visual and intellectual disabilities, to enjoy the traditional Christmas lights through the mobile application "Navidad Accesible Madrid".

Paloma Martínez en la jornada “La transformación tecnológica al servicio de las personas: inclusión, diversidad e igualdad”

El día 25 de octubre Paloma Martínez participó en la jornada “La transformación tecnológica al servicio de las personas: inclusión, diversidad e igualdad” organizada por Nueva Economía de la Lengua, CERMI y Fundación ONCE en la que se habló de las oportunidades de las tecnologías del lenguaje para la inclusión, la diversidad y la igualdad en el marco del PERTE de la Nueva Economía de la Lengua.

Publicado el artículo "EASIER System. Evaluating a Spanish Lexical Simplification Proposal with People with Cognitive Impairments"

Escrito por Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcon, Paloma Martínez y Jose A. Macías y publicado en la revista International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction en octubre del 2022

The HULAT group has received the approval of the PICOGAC project in the 2021 call for proposals "Ecological Transition and Digital Transition Projects".

The HULAT group has received approval for the project "Platform for the Delivery of Online Classes and Generation of Accessible Notes for people with sensory disabilities" (PICOGAC) in the call 2021 - "Green Transition and Digital Transition Projects" TED2021-132182A-I

Spanish hospitals fail in web accessibility

Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcón y Paloma Martínez have presented the article "Accessibility and readability compliance in Spanish public hospital websites" at the 10th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2022).

According to this study carried out, hospital websites do not obtain good results in web accessibility according to the standards to be met, such as WCAG 2.1.

This research evaluated automatically and manually by experts accessibility the compliance of the main public websites of Spanish hospitals through their home page. The results indicated that no website of the 48 analyzed is accessible according to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and only four websites met WCAG 2.1 level A.

Several more frequent errors were identified such as images without the textual description that cannot be interpreted by screen readers and a lack of information about the purpose of the links. These errors make hospital websites more difficult to access, especially for people with cognitive and visual impairments.

Likewise, the readability values ​​obtained in the texts of the websites of Spanish hospitals were not satisfactory: 33 websites out of the 48 studied presented readability barriers. This indicates that the texts of the web pages of hospitals in Spain are somewhat difficult to understand for most people and citizens.

This article provides information for hospital website developers regarding the importance of adhering to web accessibility guidelines and applying standards in website design, as well as for web content authors in order to make the texts more accessible and legible to all citizens.

REFERENCIA: Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcón and Paloma Martínez. (2022) Accessibility and readability compliance in Spanish public hospital websites. 10th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2022). ACM Digital Library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563137.3563143

[Presentation]

Lourdes Moreno, reelegida Presidenta de la Asociación Interacción Persona-Ordenador (AIPO).

Lourdes Moreno, compañera del grupo HULAT y del departamento de Informática ha sido reelegida Presidenta de la Asociación Interacción Persona-Ordenador (AIPO). AIPO es la sociedad científica de España que tiene como objetivo promover y difundir la Interacción Persona-Ordenador y servir de vínculo entre los científicos y profesionales que desarrollen actividades en este ámbito.