Universal Information Access Through Multimodal Interaction: Graduate Student Consortium

Each year since 2003, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has sponsored a graduate student consortium at the VL/HCC Symposia, on themes related to diversity and universal access of software development technologies. The research theme of this year´s event is expressed by the following question and elaboration: How can designers of digital devices and environments better address universal access issues through multiple modes of interaction? Operation of digital devices is increasingly necessary in our information society, to locate, retrieve, and manipulate information, whenever it is needed, wherever it may reside. Providing these capabilities to all people, including those who are disadvantaged by their background, education, learning style, or physical abilities, is a universal access problem. We aim to explore all aspects of universal access, with a special emphasis on multimodal interaction