Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers
  and Accessibility 2007 - Assets 2007
Tempe, AZ - October 15 - 17, 2007


The full text of the papers presented at the Assets 2007 are available at:
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1296843&type=proceeding&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&idx=1296843&part=Proceedings&WantType=Proceedings&title=ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies


The best papers were:

Best paper: Evaluating American Sign Language generation through the
participation of native ASL signers 

We discuss important factors in the design of evaluation studies for systems
that generate animations of American Sign Language (ASL) sentences. In
particular, we outline how some cultural and linguistic characteristics of
members of the American Deaf community must be taken into account so as to
ensure the accuracy of evaluations involving these users. Finally, we
describe our implementation and user-based evaluation (by native ASL signers)
of a prototype ASL generator to produce sentences containing classifier
predicates, frequent and complex spatial phenomena that previous ASL
generators have not produced. 

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296843.1296879


Best student paper: Slipping and drifting: using older users to uncover
pen-based target acquisition difficulties 

This paper presents the results of a study to gather information on the
underlying causes of pen -based target acquisition difficulty. In order to
observe both simple and complex interaction, two tasks (menu and Fitts'
tapping) were used. Thirty-six participants across three age groups (18-54,
54-69, and 70-85) were included to draw out both general shortcomings of
targeting, and those difficulties unique to older users. Three primary
sources of target acquisition difficulty were identified: slipping off the
target, drifting unexpectedly from one menu to the next, and missing a menu
selection by selecting the top edge of the item below. Based on these
difficulties, we then evolved several designs for improving pen-based target
acquisition. An additional finding was that including older users as
participants allowed us to uncover pen-interaction deficiencies that we would
likely have missed otherwise. 

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296843.1296848