Assignment 1: Large Print and Speech Browsing

Performance of Graphical, Text and Voice Browsing

The purpose is to get a feel for how people experience the web in different ways using a standard graphical browser, a text browsing and voice browsing experience.

Due

February 26th, 2003

Scavenger Hunt Questions

Group A Questions (Graphical Browsing)

1. What is the birthdate of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus (one of the co-stars on the situation comedy "Seinfeld")?
2. What were the headlines of the New York Times today?
3. How many countries are part of the European Union?
4. What is the rate for an airline ticket from American Airlines from Champaign to Boston, leaving February 28th and Returing March 2nd?
5. What year was Prohibition amended to the constitution?
6. Who invented the transistor?

Group B Questions (Text Browsing)

1. What is the birthdate of actor Mel Gibson?
2. What are the headlines of the Boston Globe today?
3. How many countries in South America?
4. What is the rate for an airline ticket from Northwest Airlines from Champaign to Boston, leaving February 28th and Returing March 2nd?
5. How many people signed the Declaration of Independence?
6. Who invented the first man made plastic?

Group C Questions (Speech Browsing)

1. What is the birthdate of actor John Wayne?
2. What are the headlines in San Francisco Examiner?
3. How many countries in Africa?
4. What is the rate for an airline ticket from Amtrak from Champaign to Boston, leaving February 28th and Returing March 2nd?
5. What was the last amendment to the United State Consitution?
6. Who invented the first visible light laser?

Proceedure

• Always start on the same page for each search (i.e. favorite search engine).
• Discontinue searching for the answer to a question after 15 minutes.
• Submit reponses to Jon Gunderson (jongund@uiuc.edu) using an HTML table, excel spreadsheet or any other text format that includes the information about the browsing technique and question # for each piece of data.

Definition of Graphical Browsing

1. The standard setting you use for graphical browsing

Definition of Text Only Browsing

1. Use Opera Browser
2. Set default font size to 24 point
3. Turn off author supplied color information
4. Set user defined background color to black and foreground color to white
5. Set univisted link color to green and visited link color to be yellow
6. Turn table support off (only avialable with Opera browser)
7. Turn off image rendering
8. Use only keyboard commands to control the browser (no mouse)

Setting up Opera

1. Copy highcontrast.css from CD-ROM to Drive C: root directory
2. Start Opera
3. Go to File menu
4. Select Preferences option from file menu
5. Select Page Style option from list on left hand side of dialog box
6. In the Author Mode make sure the only options selected are:
   • Page style sheet
   • Page fonts and colors
   • My link style
   • Tables
7. In the User Mode make sure the only options selected are:
   • My style sheet
8. In the My Style Sheet section make sure you have a reference to c:\highcontrast.css
9. Exit from preferences dialog box
10. Use G key to toggle images on and off
11. Use Control-G to toggle between author and user styling of web pages
12. Use numeric keypad + and - keys to increase and decrease magnification of text

Definition of Speech Browsing

1. Use IBM Home Page Reader for navigating the Web with voice
2. Turn the computer display off and only use speech for viewing information
3. Use only the keyboard for controlling the browser

Data Collection

• Question number and the Group the question came from(A,B,C)
• Approximate time
• Number of links followed until information was found
• The url where you found the information