Integration of a regular application into a user interface adaptation engine in the MyUI project

Abstract

Software development is increasingly focusing its design on users suffering from different kinds of disabilities or impairments, as it is the case for the elderly or handicapped people for instance. Real-time adaptable graphical user interfaces is a promising solution for designing accessible applications for users with special needs. Essentially, collecting context information and combining it with information about the user can be used to customize the content of the interface itself, and so it allows improving the user experience in his interaction with the application. The EU-funded FP7 MyUI project has emerged in the adaptive graphical interfaces domain, addressing important barriers which include the developers' lack of awareness and expertise, time and cost requirements of incorporating accessibility and missing validated approaches and infrastructures of accesible software design. This paper presents the technology used and the experiences collected in the integration process of a regular application into such a framework. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.