le travail à l'écran de visualisation work with display units

COMPUTERIZED OFFICE TECHNOLOGY AND VISUAL IMPAIRMENT:COMMUNICATION, ATTITUDES,AND EXPERIENCESErland Hjelmquist and Bengt JanssonDepartment of Psychology, University of GôteborgBox 14158, S-400 20 Goteborg, SwedenOffice automation usually includes all or some of the following stages:Planning, piloting, implementation of hardware, and integration of thecomputer system in the job routines. During two years a 'multimedia office',where a particular feature was a relatively large number of blind or weaksighted employees, has been under study during all stages but the last one.The office automation so far only concerns word processing. The primarypurpose was to facilitate the communication between blind and sighted persons.The present report focuses on the implementation stage. The primary questionsaddressed were influences on communication patterns, attitudes to thetechnique, subjective evaluations of usage of the equipment, and jobexpectati ons in the short and long run, as an effect of use of computers.Procedure. Seventeen secretaries, and 3 blind or visually impairedadministrators participated in the study. The secretaries were successivelyprovided with personal computers. The computers were equipped with a wordprocessor, speech synthesis, and a conversion program for a braille printer.The two blind persons used a versabraille machine, while the third weaksighted person used a personal computer (with another operation system thanthe one the secretaries used) with speech synthesis. Data were collected withinterviews and questionnaires at three occasions.Results. The visually impaired persons received to a higher degree writtenmaterial. However, converting tabulated text to braille print caused difficultproblems. The secretaries approved of the facilities of word processing. Onthe other hand, many of the secretaries stated that they experienced morestress due to use of computers. Some of them also stated that they got toolittle support when problems arose with word processing. Furthermore, it wasfound that a richer usage of word processor functions correlated withdifferent general positive attitudes to usage of computers.The implementation of computers influenced the communication patterns of theparticipants, but marginally. With exception of the most important aspect,viz that visually impaired persons received more written information,contacts concerned different problems with word processing and the brailleprint(ers). Moreover, during work breaks participants discussed the computerusage to some extent. However, these discussions seemed to decrease. Thus, theimplementation of computers did not result in creating new, or loosingprevious job contacts.Despite positive effects, several persons pointed to the specificcircumstances in a 'multimedia office'. They stressed the importance ofsolving problems of a minor implementation before large scale implementationtake place.KEYWORDS: Blindness, media conversion, communicationUSER PERFORMANCE AND ERROR ANALYSIS:COMPUTER BASED NEWSPAPER READING BY BLIND PEOPLEErland Hjelmquist and Bengt JanssonDepartment of Psychology, University of GôteborgBox 14158, S-400 20 GSteborg, SwedenDuring a number of years we have been involved in studies of blindpeople'sreading of speech synthesized daily morning papers. In this report we winconcentrate on error analysis of used commands.The blind users are not expected to have any previous experience withcomputers, therefore it is important that the command giving is conceded ofas simple.About 30 commands are available to the reader. If thecharacters which do not match the pre-programmed commands the system gives anerror message without explication.Procedure The analysis of errors is based on usage log of 50 blind persons^ t h none or little previous experience of computers. The age range wasbetween 20-80 years.The erroneous commands (ERROR) given by the users were studied with multipleregression. The following components were treated as explaining variabiLes;•Reading aspects (amount, time, speed), command aspects (length ofrespectively time to enter commands, number of given movement commands in thehorizontally and vertically organized newspaper), system aspects (waiting timefor execution of commands, number of daily starts of the system).The command giving has also been studied sequentially (allcommands). For each user the commands have been organized m a Markov chain.Results. About 5% of the commands given by the users were not £Ï^tST The multiple (stepwise) regression showed that 3 P RE * XCT °significantly influenced ERROR. These predictors explained 75% of thevariance.The most important predictor concerned the number of daily starts of thesystem (resets). Daily restarts of the system indicate a usage characterizedby many, but short sessions. The next most important predictor concerned thes eT^f entering cormnands on the braille keyboard. Thisto misspellings. Finally, users that more often moved around in thtext basemade more erroneous commands. Especially movements other than forwardmovements caused errors, probably due to orientation problems m thehierarchically structured text base.The sequential analysis showed that erroneous commands in 35% of the caseswere followed by the same or other erroneous commands. Furthermore, m It ofthe cases erroneous commands were solved by reset of the system. The findingsare interesting from a general psychological point of view, and from apractical point of view they indicate a need for a help system.KEYWORDS: Blindness, newspapers, error analysisTEV 1989 —DEUXIÈME CONFÉRENCE SCIENTIFIQUE INTERNATIONALE • MONTRÉAL • SECOND INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE — WWDU144TEV 1989 - DEUX.ÈME CONFÉRENCE S O ^ I ^ N T E I ^ ^ • SECOND INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE WWDU 1989145