To begin, I'd like to show you guys a screenshot of something I mentioned during week 5. One of the problems we had with our test applications was that when you opened a note box up it would cover the lecture. This wasn't how we envisioned the application working, so some code was added to push the lecture view up whenever you opened the note view, and likewise push it down when the note view was exited. We didn't include a screenshot of this during the entry for week 5 so I thought that we should take one and put it in this weeks entry so that you guys could get an idea of what we were talking about.
You can see how the note box does not cover up the lecture, they are separate views and so all of the lecture will be accessible while you're typing your notes. Before, the bottom half of the lecture would get covered up and could not be viewed.
This week we refined our search for related research that people have done regarding accessibility and mobile devices. Our CREU faculty member discussed several different conferences with us last week, and by searching for papers from those conferences we were able to find more relevant and more academic papers on the subject. We found a lot of papers that focused on visual impairments and accessibility by looking through the ACM Digital Library and narrowing our search to specific conferences.
One of the conferences that seemed to have the most relevant papers was ASSETS, which makes sense because the ASSETS conference focuses on using computing and information technology to help people that have different kinds of disabilities.
We focused our search on conferences within the last couple of years, from 08 and on. The reasoning behind this was that smartphones and other touchscreen mobile devices are relatively new, and we also wanted to make sure that we were looking at current research so that we could see what the latest findings have been. This doesn't mean that older research should be overlooked, but by looking at the newer papers we were able to find studies that were very related to our project and could help us in developing our own plans for our usability tests.
Interestingly, our CREU faculty member actually knew about a lot of the authors of the papers we were finding. As a result, we might be able to get in touch with some of them so that we can learn more about the process they used for testing, as well as how they found participants. When you're conducting research with a very specific group of people, it can be really difficult to find participants for your studies.
A lot of the articles that I've read, that have dealt with research about visual impairments, have mentioned having participants who were sighted but wearing blindfolds. I saw this mentioned in two different articles and I was really surprised by it. I feel like using sighted participants could give you much different results, even if they were blindfolded. I'm hoping that with our tests we will be able to find enough participants that have visual impairments so that our research will be more sound.
-Lindsey
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