No abstract

Ubiquitous environments dynamics brings new possibilities of interaction with technology and with people in the same environment. This paper investigates accessibility challenges in ubiquitous environments through existing formal principles (Universal Design principles, WCAG 2.1 and Good Practices of Urban Design). A case study at a museum scenario sheds light on the need for adaptations and lack of coverage of the principles. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) suitability analysis of existing principles and formal standards for accessibility transposed to the analyzed scenario; 2) from the analysis result, insights on missing aspects that might be brought to the design of ubiquitous computing scenarios accessible for all.

Ambientes ubíquos proporcionam novas formas de interação por meio de sensores e atuadores espalhados pelo ambiente. Sistemas Socioenativos são instâncias de ambientes ubíquos que enfatizam um acoplamento tripartite entre o Físico, o Digital e o Social. Devido a diversidade de possibilidades de interação, prover acesso equitativo para estes cenários é um desafio a ser investigado. Este estudo de caso tem como objetivo avaliar o acesso na Aquarela Virtual, um cenário idealizado para permitir interações remotas devido à pandemia do Covid-19. A avaliação utiliza o instrumento UbiAccess e analisa o caso de uma criança com Transtorno de Espectro Autista (TEA) interagindo no cenário. As principais contribuições são: 1) Avaliação do acesso em um cenário socioenativo remoto e com a perspectiva de um caso TEA; 2) Investigação sobre viabilidade de uso do UbiAccess para cenários remotos de interação.

Ubiquitous computing has brought new challenges for the design of scenarios for people–technology interactions. Despite considerable research on formal accessibility standards, related work has hardly investigated them in ubiquitous computing contexts. In this work, we investigate means of analyzing accessibility aspects in ubiquitous environments based on two standard instruments: the Universal Design (UD) Principles and Guidelines and the W3C-WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium). Both instruments were applied to the context of socioenactive ubiquitous environments, providing insights into their applicability and shortcomings. As a result of this analysis we constructed UbiAccess, an instrument to evaluate access in ubiquitous scenarios, which combines and extends characteristics of both UD and W3C-WCAG, filling in some of the gaps we identified. The application of UbiAccess to a case study shows the advantages of its use in informing the evaluation of access in ubiquitous scenarios.