AccessComputing News - September 2018: All Articles

AccessComputing has received supplemental funding to undertake an additional initiative that supports our work. The supplement will allow us to increase the capacity of other computing-related projects funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) to recruit and fully include individuals with disabilities in computing instruction, research, and other activities supported by their projects. We aim to foster synergistic and lasting relationships among NSF project leaders to promote systemic changes toward inclusiveness in computing research, education, and careers.
As part of NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) commitment to broadening participation in computing (BPC), grant proposals in a subset of programs must provide meaningful BPC plans. Among the supplement's objectives are to increase the capacity of CISE projects to

• recruit, mentor, and fully include individuals with disabilities in computing outreach, instruction, research, and other activities;
• develop and implement strategies to shift culture of departments/organizations to be more welcoming and accessible to people with disabilities; and
• create and deploy accessibly designed project websites, documents, curriculum, and videos.

 The effort will result in the creation of online resources that will ensure a great impact for many years to come. AccessComputing initiatives aim to increase the successful participation of people with disabilities in STEM fields and enhance these fields with their perspectives and expertise. We look forward to extending our impact with additional project funding provided by NSF.

The 2018 AccessComputing Capacity Building Award goes to Howard Kramer of the University of Colorado Boulder. He teaches courses on universal design and is the PI for a grant project called Promoting the Integration of Universal Design in University Curricula, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. For more than two decades, Howard has led the Accessing Higher Ground conference, which focuses on accessible media and technology in higher education and legal and policy issues regarding IT accessibility. In recent years, Howard has been a champion of teaching accessibility to students in computing education. Richard Ladner and Terrill Thompson will present the award to Howard in November at Accessing Higher Ground.

Teach Access is pleased to announce the 13 faculty member winners of the first-time Teach Access Curriculum Development Awards! These $5,000 awards will be used to develop modules, presentations, exercises or curriculum enhancements or changes that introduce the fundamental concepts and skills of accessible design and development in existing, classroom-based courses.

Read the full announcement about Teach Access awards here. 

I am a junior in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. I am majoring in computer science and engineering. This past summer, I completed an Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) internship with Dr. Brendan Morris, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Real-Time Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I designed, implemented, and evaluated a low-power, lightweight facility access monitoring system utilizing modern facial recognition technology.

I first met Dr. Morris while attending high school in Las Vegas and working on a computer science STEM endorsement for my diploma. He understood my interests and training and consequently offered to mentor my research.

I found the internship to be both challenging and rewarding. Because my project involved development of a complete software and hardware system, I was able to apply many of the principles I had learned in both computer science and electrical engineering classes. I also became familiar with Facenet and Open Face deep learning facial recognition technologies and computational devices such as the Raspberry Pi and the Movidius Neural Compute Stick. During my internship, I participated in weekly research team meetings, where I learned about a wide range of other computer vision projects being conducted by undergraduate and graduate students in Dr. Morris’s laboratory.

I was able to live at home while completing the internship, which also allowed me to accomplish two personal goals that were important to me: (1) I competed in the Nevada State Amateur Golf Championships; and (2) I obtained my Nevada driver’s license!

AccessComputing and this internship have helped me in many other ways and I am returning to my coursework at UC Berkeley with new found energy and confidence.

In the past couple of years, low-cost eye-tracking devices have been introduced to the consumer market. These are mainly marketed as gaming devices, but they have also found applications in computer access for people with physical disabilities.

Eye-trackers (or gaze-trackers) are devices consisting of infrared LEDs and one or more infrared cameras. By capturing the reflection of the infrared light off of the user's eyes, an image processing algorithm can determine where on a computer monitor the user is currently looking. Historically, these devices have been very expensive, but some now sell for less than $200.

For this article, I will focus on the Tobii Eye Tracker 4C. I have personally used this device for over a year. It retails for about $150 and is marketed to a gaming audience. An adhesive magnet allows the device to be mounted to the lower edge of your computer monitor, and a USB 3.0 connection transmits data to the computer. In order to use all of the available utilities, Windows 8, 8.1, or 10 is required. Some functionality is possible with Windows 7. Tobii has not made similar hardware available with drivers for Mac or Linux. (Other devices on the market have similar technical specifications and will work with much of the same software.)

I have found that the Eye Tracker 4C works best with a moderately-large external monitor, but there is an upper size limit for monitors: either 27 inches or 30 inches depending on aspect ratio. In order for the device to work properly, the basic positioning requirement is that your face is oriented towards the monitor, with your two eyes at the same height. In a traditional monitor set up, this means sitting upright facing the monitor, but a variety of other positions could be achieved with creative monitor mounting.

It is possible to use the eye-tracker with a laptop, but targeting will be less accurate. The screen can also become a limiting factor when working on a laptop, as an on-screen keyboard large enough for eye tracking will likely occupy at least half of the screen. A few gaming-focused laptops are available with essentially the same eye-tracking hardware integrated into the laptop itself.

​Tobii provides drivers and calibration software, along with a few other utilities. The calibration is quite simple, only requiring the user to stare at a few points on the screen for a few seconds apiece. By default, the software attempts to track both of your eyes, but it is configurable to track only the right or only the left eye.

Most of the auxiliary software provided by Tobii should be considered more of a demo than a useful piece of software, but one feature in particular is worth mentioning. You can configure the software to have the mouse cursor "jump" to the current gaze point when the user starts moving the mouse in that general direction. This can be quite useful if combining eye tracking technology with a physical mouse (or trackball, or joystick, etc.). This configuration allows large mouse movements across the screen to be handled by the eye tracker and small, precise movements to be controlled by a physical mouse. Other options include configuring the cursor to jump when a key is pressed and setting thresholds for the minimum jump distance.

To control the computer entirely with your eyes, additional software is required. A high-quality, free, and open-source option is OptiKey. (Full disclosure: I have contributed to OptiKey and its documentation.) At its core, OptiKey is a tool that allows users to interact with a Windows computer and generate synthesized speech output using eye gaze. It features an on-screen keyboard where you point with your eyes and click either with a switch or by dwelling on a key. Well-designed mouse emulation tools are also included. These include options that allow you to more easily select small targets by zooming in on a screen region. OptiKey also features multiple methods of word prediction and completion from the keyboard and the ability to change common settings without exiting the keyboard environment. It is designed so that, once Optikey is running, you can interact with the computer using only the eye-tracker (and optionally a switch). OptiKey contains keyboards in many languages and even includes a set of pictorial keyboards (designed to allow children and others who struggle with written language to communicate).

It is entirely possible to use OptiKey to write source code, but some of the symbols that are frequently used in code are buried in OptiKey, requiring the user to navigate through multiple sub keyboards before reaching the desired symbol. My amazing friend Maxie has been helping me create and implement some alternative keyboard layouts better suited to coding, and you can find our work (as well as instructions for making your own custom keyboards) on GitHub.

Project Iris is another software package that works with the eye-tracker. It is tailored towards allowing you to craft your own eye-tracking-based interfaces for Windows programs. Its most powerful feature is "interactors," on-screen rectangles that respond when you look at them, triggering keystrokes or other actions. The software is particularly useful when real-time input is important, such as in video games. This software isn't free, but there is a free 14 day trial available.

Dasher is another free and open-source on-screen keyboard, and its design works extremely well for noisy input like eye trackers. To use Dasher, you must first map the eye tracker input to the mouse. This can be done with Project Iris or with a simple FreePIE script (see below). Dasher is very good for fast text entry, but it is not good for editing or navigating user interfaces. I like to describe using Dasher with an eye tracker as "interactive reading." Dasher does have quite a steep learning curve, but at the top of that curve, it really is as easy as reading.

If you want to write your own code to interface with the eye tracker, FreePIE is a great place to start. It lets you write Python scripts that take input from any number of devices (including the eye tracker) and emulate the mouse and/or keyboard as output.

Led by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the Information School, and DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) at UW, AccessComputing is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508, CNS-1042260, CNS-1539179). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. For further information, to be placed on the mailing list, request materials in an alternate format, or to make suggestions for project publications or web pages, contact us:

AccessComputing
University of Washington
Box 354842
Seattle, WA 98195-4842
accesscomp@uw.edu
www.uw.edu/accesscomputing/
206-685-DOIT (3648) (voice/TTY)
888-972-DOIT (3648) (toll free voice/TTY)
206-221-4171 (FAX)

Richard Ladner, PI
Sheryl Burgstahler, Co-PI
Amy J. Ko, Co-PI
Jacob O. Wobbrock, Co-PI
Brianna Blaser, Project Coordinator
Kayla Brown, Project Coordinator
Lyla Crawford, Internal Evaluator