Designing interface toolkit with dynamic selectable modality

Abstract

Incorporating flexibility to select desirable modality into user interface systems is needed for people with disabilities, since most modern applications use graphical user interfaces forcing fixed modality which is useful only to sighted users.However, the requirement of user interfaces with flexible and selectable modality is not a specific problem of disabled persons but a general problem of interfaces in the next generation, considering that environments, in which computers are used, are widening rapidly.This paper discusses about an architecture of user interface toolkit to support flexibility required by both users with disability and users in special environment, and proposes a model of semantic abstraction of user interaction, named abstract widgets. The experimental implementation of such toolkit, named Fruit system, is also described.