Caring, Sharing Widgets a toolkit of sensitive widgets.pdfVIP

Crease, M. and Brewster, S.A. and Gray, P. (2000) Caring, sharing widgets: a toolkit of sensitive widgets. In, 14th Annual Conference of the British HCI Group, 5-8 September 2000 British Computer Society conference series, pages pp. 257-270, Sunderland, England. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3211/ Glasgow ePrints Service http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Caring, Sharing Widgets: A Toolkit of Sensitive Widgets Murray Crease, Stephen Brewster Philip Gray Department of Computing Science University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK, G12 8QQ Tel : +44 (0)141 339 8855, +44 (0)141 330 4966 Fax : +44 (0) 141 330 4913 Email : murray,stephen,pdg@dcs.gla.ac.uk Web : http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~murray,~stephen,~pdg Although most of us communicate using multiple sensory modalities in our lives, and many of our computers are similarly capable of multi-modal interaction, most human-computer interaction is predominantly in the visual mode. This paper describes a toolkit of widgets that are capable of presenting themselves in multiple modalities, but further are capable of adapting their presentation to suit the contexts and environments in which they are used. This is of increasing importance as the use of mobile devices becomes ubiquitous. Keywords: audio, multi-modal, resource-sensitive, sonically enhanced widgets, toolkit 1 Introduction Many modern applications are designed to run on powerful workstations with large monitors and powerful graphical capabilities. Whilst this is often the case, perhaps the user wishes to run the application on a less powerful laptop, or perhaps even on a hand-held device. In these cases, the application will not have access to the same amount of visual output resource available to display its interface. Even if it is the case that the application is running on a powerful workstation with a large monitor, the feedback provided by the graphical interface may be better provided by a different sensory modality or a combination of seve