Multimodal Interfaces to Mobile Terminals – A Design-For-All Approach
Knut Kvale, Narada Dilp · InTech eBooks · 2010
User Interfaces 208 friendliness and flexibility in the use of the services, whereas for the disabled users this is a means by which they can compensate for their impaired communication mode.The outline of this chapter is as follows: Section 2 first defines multimodal interaction and discusses various forms of multimodality.Then we confine ourselves to speech centric multimodal interfaces for mobile terminals and demonstrate the advantages of this functionality in two form-fillings applications.Section 3 relates the principles of Design for All to multimodal user interfaces.Section 4 presents a generic system architecture for multimodal interfaces, whereas Section 5 provides more details of our implementation of a public web-based bus-route information service.Section 6 describes the user evaluations of our system by five test persons with different impairments, as well as a dyslectic and an aphasic test user. Various forms of multimodality Multimodal versus multimediaThe term modality refers to a form of sensory perception: hearing, vision, touch, taste and smell.For our research on human-machine interaction, we define modality as a communication channel between the user and the device.The modes above can be combined in a multimodal interface, containing audio (e.g. in the form of speech), vision (e.g. in the form of text and graphics, or moving video), and touch (e.g.touch sensitive screens).We do not consider services using one particular input mode, e.g.speech, and another output mode, e.g.text/graphics as multimodal services.We distinguish between multimode and multimedia; that is, media is the representation format for the information or content in a certain mode.For example, speech and music are two media formats in the auditory mode.Text, graphics and video are examples of media types in the visual mode. How to referenceIn order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following: Knut Kvale and Narada Dilp Warakagoda (2010).Multimodal Interfaces to Mobile Terminals -A Design-For-All Approach, User Interfaces, Rita Matrai (Ed.),