I'm surprised to find that nobody has still filled in my research survey, despite a number of commitments to this a number of weeks ago. I understand that you may be busy, but I want to point out a few things about why I have spent the past 5 months working on the document filtering and adaption techniques that I have developed. I hope that this will explain why I'm asking you to take part and what benefits it will have for the community if you do.
Earlier last year my department carried out some work that resulted in big accessibility improvements for some web sites. This work is currently being written up by the person responsible. The problem was that these accessibility improvements were only applicable to web pages. The new techniques that I've been working on -- and are requesting your feedback on via the survey -- are designed for other types of (long) documents -- from game manuals to academic materials. We have a number of reasons to believe that this type of work could be applied in many fields and, as it helps out non-disabled people too, it would be much easier to get an organisation to adopt it than a technology specifically targeted at disabled people -- so there's more chance of it being made available for people like us in future. Sadly we are running low on time to be able to prove that what we are doing works. If I don't get the results I need very soon it will be very hard for me to get this work published, accepted and into the mainstream research community. Please try to support this work if you can; it could make a big difference. I realise you are here to talk about Quake and that my work has taken me away from that somewhat lately, but all the stuff I am doing is for the improvement of accessibility. As I've mentioned before, my research plans involve AGRIP later on, but I need to get some other work (such as this) completed first so that the ideas and techniques I will need later on have been developed. I hope that you will be able to help by taking the survey ( http://survey.agrip.org.uk/ ) and -- perhaps even more importantly -- tell us if you are having any problems with it so that we can fix them. We believe everything to be working so please let us know if it is not! Finally, I know that if we can get results on this system we can use them to improve it and ultimately improve accessibility issues for many people. You have a chance to contribute to this. As many of you know, I asked for people to let me know if they are willing to help a while back because these results rely on input from AGRIP users. Without your help, a lot of the work will fall by the wayside because I don't have time to draw up a new survey that is more general. Enough rambling from me. I just hope that this may have cleared up some issues that may have been causing confusion. It would be sad to see this work go to waste because (a) I feel it could genuinely benefit people and (b) I just spent the best part of 5 months of my PhD working on it and I'd like to see it through to completion, but need your help to do this. In the meantime, happy fraggin'. I am still working on the stats site improvements and they are progressing. Sebby is nearly back up-to-date and maybe will be able to respond to the list mail that I can't soon. best regards, -- Matthew T. Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ AGRIP-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.agrip.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/agrip-discuss
