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Page 1
Executive Summary
Interfaces For Everyone
Computing, communications technologies, and associated
enterprises advanced enough in the early 1990s for the national
information infrastructure (NII) to be accepted as public
infrastructure. As a result, concern is growing about what will be
required to enable most if not all of the public to use NII
resources. The opportunity for broad public access and use reflects
many factors, among them the technologies used directly by people
as part of their interactions with the information and
communications systems that make up the NII. This report outlines
issues and directions for progress in developing interface
technologies that will enable increasing numbers of people to use
the NII effectively. Drawing from a late 1996 workshop hosted by
the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the steering
committee responsible for this project derived ideas for research
in computing, communications, and social science to advance the
underlying sciences and enable development of innovative,
implementable concepts for interfaces that are more usable and
capable than today's technologies and are accessible by as many
people as possible.
The NII is dominated by computing and communications systems,
and the human-machine or user interface represents the means by
which people communicate with a particular system and the machines
and people connected to it. In this report such technologies are
referred to as every-citizen interfaces (ECIs), reflecting the
project's mission to examine what might be required for every
citizen to be able to use the resources
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Page 1
Executive Summary
Interfaces For Everyone
Computing, communications technologies, and associated
enterprises advanced enough in the early 1990s for the national
information infrastructure (NII) to be accepted as public
infrastructure. As a result, concern is growing about what will be
required to enable most if not all of the public to use NII
resources. The opportunity for broad public access and use reflects
many factors, among them the technologies used directly by people
as part of their interactions with the information and
communications systems that make up the NII. This report outlines
issues and directions for progress in developing interface
technologies that will enable increasing numbers of people to use
the NII effectively. Drawing from a late 1996 workshop hosted by
the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the steering
committee responsible for this project derived ideas for research
in computing, communications, and social science to advance the
underlying sciences and enable development of innovative,
implementable concepts for interfaces that are more usable and
capable than today's technologies and are accessible by as many
people as possible.
The NII is dominated by computing and communications systems,
and the human-machine or user interface represents the means by
which people communicate with a particular system and the machines
and people connected to it. In this report such technologies are
referred to as every-citizen interfaces (ECIs), reflecting the
project's mission to examine what might be required for every
citizen to be able to use the resources
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Page 2
available through the NII. ECIs are defined broadly as including
input and output hardware and software as well as design and
performance characteristics of applications-such as ease and speed
of communication-that influence the overall experience of a person
or group of people working in a system. The concern of the study is
that, even though the usability of systems has improved
substantially over many years, current interfaces still exclude
many people from effective NII access. Most obvious are individuals
with physical and other disabilities, but as articles in even the
national and business press attest, people without such
distinguishing characteristics, even expert users of NII systems,
experience difficulties that constrain or even preclude their full
use of NII resources.
The steering committee emphasizes that effective technological
research on and development of ECIs must be grounded in a
well-considered understanding of the needs and behavior of people.
Achieving ECIs is thus an interdisciplinary endeavor involving
computing-related science and engineering disciplines as well as
social science disciplines. Progress toward developing improved
ECIs will require basic research in theory, modeling, and
conceptualization; experimental research involving building,
evaluating, and testing of artifacts; and empirical social science
research assessing segments of the population and how people
actually work with different systems. In all cases, data,
methodology, and tools are themselves targets for research or
research support.
Certainly, however, the needed ECI-related research discussed in
this report accounts for only part of the challenge of making NII
resources broadly accessible. Policies aimed at promoting universal
access to the NII must be developed that address economic factors,
such as a person's ability to pay for communication and information
services and access devices, as well as social and psychological
factors, such as organizational, family, and peer group support,
and personal preferences. Although the importance of such factors
is clear, examination of them is beyond the scope of this report,
which focuses primarily on issues related to computing,
information, and communications technologies.
Technologies For Human-Machine
Communication By Every Citizen
At this time and for the foreseeable future, enlarging the set
of options for human-machine communication, not replacing older
technologies with new per se, is a broad goal for ECI research.
Making a full range of options available involves continued
improvements in mainstream interface technologies, such as
graphical direct manipulation interfaces and typed and
menu-selected command line interfaces, as well as research on modes
that are currently not widely available. Recent advances in the
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performance and the commercial deployment of speech recognition
and natural language processing technologies, for example, indicate
their promise for future interfaces. In the last several years,
progress in research and in the development of commercial products
points to credible prospects for software agents as aids to
ordinary citizens. Major progress in virtual reality technologies
and three-dimensional user interfaces generally suggests their
near-term availability. A variety of ideas are being generated for
collaboration and communications technologies. Other options such
as gesture recognition, pointing devices, and haptic devices are
being proposed and in some cases developed and installed. Together,
these technologies provide a rich set of opportunities to create
new human-machine interface paradigms for the coming years.
Just as the NII is more than a single entity, so also will ECIs
be diverse and varied. No single interface can be used by
absolutely everyone, because people differ in ways relevant to the
design of the technologies they use and because for a given person
the activities and conditions of use for technologies vary:
graphical user interfaces are problematic for blind people and also
for people driving cars, for example. Experts who have concentrated
on meeting the needs of users with specific limitations have
discovered not only that it is possible to achieve adaptations of
conventional interfaces to suit those users (giving rise to
prototypes and commercial systems), but also that such adaptations
often prove attractive and useful to many others. Such experiences
underscore the value of medium and modality independence for future
ECIs. Research and experience with real systems show that
cross-disability access is compatible with diversity in the look
and feel of an interface and that providing for it does not imply
compromising capabilities that are useful to people without
disabilities. In the language of this project, aiming for use by
every citizen can enhance use by ordinary citizens. Even the
seemingly ordinary are heterogeneous: the general population varies
greatly in computer skills (e.g., from novice to expert); in the
ability to speak, read, and write English; in personal cognitive
styles (e.g., from linguistic/verbal to spatial/visual); and in
personal propensity for using complex technological gadgets.
Other motivations for ensuring the versatility and adaptability
of user interface technologies in the NII context include the
desirability of achieving nomadicity, the ability of people to use
the NII effectively regardless of their location, and the quality
of available computing or communications equipment and services,
which may vary depending on whether users are on the road, in the
office, or en route between locations. Another more commercial
motivation for emphasizing versatile and adaptable interfacing is
the drive by relevant businesses to produce mass-market
technologies. Although in the early 1990s popular discussions of
the NII focused
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on the use of personal computers (PCs) and the Internet as an
NII component, more recent experiences with commercialization and
public acceptance are leading to a broader view in the late 1990s
of an NII accessed by PCs, telephones, televisions, and a myriad of
consumer electronics and other devices. Some of these devices have
primary purposes other than computing and communications but
incorporate embedded systems that allow for connection with
networked infrastructure and therefore integration with other
computing and communications systems. This diversification further
broadens the range of people, activities, and environments that can
be supported by the NII and thus represents one of the requirements
for effective ECIs; it underscores the value of certain kinds of
research, such as research and development to lower costs or foster
compatibility. Taken together, the evolving set of motivations for
facilitating human-machine communication gives rise to a range of
ECI desiderata: flexibility, adaptability, ease of learning,
compatibility, affordability, and so on.
Synthesizing A Research Agenda
An important starting point in building a research agenda is to
ask what people's computing, communication, and information needs
are with respect to the NII and how these needs can be met. This
approach involves studying people doing ordinary tasks with and
without technological aids and asking how new technologies might
improve the process. It can also include gathering data from
existing applications as input to guide new designs. Proposed
systems can then be simulated or built in prototype for testing,
refinement, and evaluation. Work of this kind can in turn guide
decisions in technical areas concerning specific perceived needs
and new research goals. A complementary approach is to study
technical areas to discover fundamental mechanisms that can serve
in providing support when they are needed. The pursuit of the two
paths together can lead to an eventual synthesis of truly usable
and important new aids for future communities.
Generally with this view in mind, the steering committee
crystallized three recommendations that are summarized here and are
presented in detail in Chapter 7. The first is that a major new
effort be launched to seek new paradigms for human-machine
interaction. The research community recognizes the success achieved
by technologies developed two or more decades ago but also sees
many indications that better alternatives are needed and are
possible. Among the drawbacks of or problems with current
technologies are that they are too finely tuned to the
peculiarities of the technologically elite, too inflexible for the
variety of applications and environments that the NII will offer,
and too inaccessible to ordinary users or to individuals with
disabilities. New, better interfaces are needed
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that utilize a variety of technologies that are now becoming
available, that are usable by a broader cross section of people,
that take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the NII, and
that emphasize the new role of technology in society as a mediator
among individuals, groups of individuals, and networked machines.
Elaborating on this recommendation, the steering committee in
Chapter 7 specifies a series of properties and characteristics that
it thinks new and improved interfaces should have, including
learnability, modality and medium independence, and a strong
capability for supporting group activities.
The steering committee's second recommendation encourages
investment in research on the component subsystems needed for ECIs
and emphasizes the importance of studies of human and
organizational behaviors and ways that technology can support them.
It encourages research on a variety of potentially useful
technologies, including input technologies (such as speech
recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, gesture
sensing, and multimodal input languages) and output technologies
(such as flexible, portable, and compact displays, high-resolution
displays, virtual reality, haptic devices, mechanical actuators,
voice and artificial sound, and multimodal generation of output)
that can help to maximize human-machine communication by more
closely matching machine audio, visual, and mechanical capabilities
to those of humans. This second recommendation also emphasizes the
importance of developing modality and medium independence so that
individual systems can be used by a variety of people in a variety
of situations, and it recognizes the importance of agent
technologies that can aid in interpreting and responding
appropriately to users' needs.
The steering committee's third recommendation encourages
research at the systems level that assembles the many subsystem
components referred to in its second recommendation. It encourages
the development of theories and architectures for collaboration and
problem solving; emphasizes continued studies in human-centered
design methodologies and social science research into how well the
public is being served by new and proposed technologies; and
underscores the importance of building experimental human-machine
systems to test, refine, and measure the effectiveness of various
proposed systems.
Because they have not been emphasized in other research or may
have unusual payoffs in achieving improved ECIs, the steering
committee chose to designate some areas for highest-priority
consideration and accordingly emphasizes the following:
1.
Undertake psychological, sociological, and
historical studies to determine the needs of every citizen in the
context of the NII and thus to
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provide guidance to technologists
concerning what needs to be created and what will not work for real
users.
2.
Encourage additional research on speech
recognition and the associated natural language processing so that
speech can become a viable option for input in a variety of
NII-related applications. Speech recognition and natural language
processing are each important; speech as an output option calls for
research related to speech synthesis. The steering committee was
impressed regarding both the broad need for such capabilities and
the recent progress in the field supporting the hypothesis that
speech will soon become usable for at least some interface
applications.
3.
Develop technologies that enable modality and
medium independence for as many applications as possible, in order
to support the goals of nomadicity, compatibility of interfaces
with a variety of hardware types, and usability by people with
disabilities.
4.
Develop theories and architectures that support
collaboration among networked people. The new opportunities offered
by the NII will come to fruition only if technologies are developed
that enable collaboration.
5.
Build experimental human-machine systems, for
individual users and groups, using proposed technologies or
simulations of them. Test them, refine them, install them in
applications environments, and measure their effectiveness.
The steering committee emphasizes the importance of there being
a strong experimental component in upcoming studies.
Part I
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PART I
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
natural language
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