Iwao Kobayashi*, Koichi Oda**, Hiroshi Nunokawa***, and Masatoshi Miyazaki*
* Graduate School of
Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan
{iwan,
miyazaki}@dais.is.tohoku.ac.jp
** Department of
Communication, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan
k
oda@twcu.ac.jp
*** Institute for Science Education, Miyagi
University of Education, Japan
nunokawa@ipc.miyakyo
u.ac.jp
In this paper, we report about the web-page titled "SenSui: Information Resources for Persons with Disabilities" that one of the author established and has been managing since January 1995. It is one of the earliest web pages related to disability established in Japan. One of many purposes of the web page - so-called "SenSui" - is to provide resources in Japan to net surfers in the world.During twenty-two months, many net-surfers in fifty-nine countries accessed it, and the administrator received many requests and questions. We evaluated its effectiveness in a number of aspects and gave perspectives.
The internet is epoch-making media expanding the limitations in time and space of communication. Also it reduces vastly the cost of information exchange in worldwide basis.
Formerly, there have been a very little of information and resources on disability in the major media, because they are specific to the target minority. The Internet changed the situation and especially a lot of the Web pages are now dedicated to disabilities-related issues.
The same holds for Japan. Increasing number of the Web pages are related to disabilities[1]. However, they share the same problem, i.e., foreign users are excluded from the service, because most pages are written solely in Japanese.
In order to show disability information in Japan to the world, one of the authors constructed and has been managing a web page[2] since January 1995. It is one of the earliest disability web-pages established in Japan, and aim to deal with any information about disability. The purpose of this paper is to report what was found during administrating the web page service.
The construction of the paper is as follows. We explain a purpose and contents of the web-page in chapter 2, and evaluation of the effectiveness in chapter 3. Then in chapter 4, we describe the future perspectives about the disability information on the web. In this chapter we also would like to report a brief description about other projects we have been engaged in. This will be assistive information about Japan.
This chapter explains the web page "Information Resource for Persons with Disabilities" that one of authors established January 20, 1995 and has been managing since then. As a code name, we call it "SenSui" that means water of a spring in Japanese because we compare the page to the spring of information where clean water overflows. But some users in foreign countries seem to call it "Iwan" after the nickname of the web-master.
The purpose of SenSui is to offer any kinds of information on disability like welfare and/or educational resources for persons with disabilities. It gives these services with WWW and e-mail.
There are three categories of information provided on the WWW. One is various resources useful for persons with disabilities. For example, free software for accessibility or the list of ATM/CD for the visually impaired in Japan are occupied the attention of many users in Japan. Second is the link list of other home page dealing with disability resources. The third is papers and reports of the web-master's research.
In addition, the web-master have enforced on-line consultation services utilized e-mail, and introduce materials and give advice for users individually.
The SenSui is catered for or more barrier-free to a variety of users, e.g., those from foreign countries and those with disabilities. For example, pages are bilingual (English and Japanese) for persons in foreign countries who cannot read Japanese. For persons with disabilities, it constructed depended on accessibility web page design by some researchers have reported [3][4] (e.g., SenSui was mainly text base and there are very few amounts of graphics information).
In this chapter we evaluate the effectiveness of SenSui. We describe the results of analyses into access log data and the on-line consultation records.
We counted the access frequencies on daily bases and calculated the average over each month between January 1995 to October 1996 (22 months).
In the early four months, there is a little access from Japan compared with the access from foreign countries. The access within Japan has been increasing and it counted over 120 per day in the last six months. The access from overseas also increased up to the maximum of 60 per day in 1995, but the number is leveled out in 1996.
The analysis by users' domain showed that net surfers in 59 countries accessed to SenSui. Together with the access-per-day analysis, this result indicated that the SenSui could provide a totally new, open, and global service for the disability resources, which no other services have done in Japan in the past time.
Among the five continents in the world, there were the most access from Asia. Of course in the continent there were many numbers of accesses from Japan, and those from Korea followed. In American continent, the access from the United States and Canada occupied 99% of all accesses. There are less access from Europe compared to one from Asia and American continent. But the number of countries who had access to the SenSui was the largest in this continent and counted 29. In Oceania, Australian access was 89%. There was only one country from Africa. The result showed a remarkable amount of regional differences, which is not a surprise when taking the technological differences into account.
We examined and computed the hit numbers for each contents. Over 50% of all hits were accesses for link information. Link is a major characteristic of hypertext. Through link information, users are able to retrieve the related information quite easily. The more links are listed in a page, the more information is provided to visitors, e.g., famous search engines. In other words, once a page added to a well-known link list, many users will be benefited from the page. The result showed that visitors saw the SenSui as a HUB for diverse information resources.
In the section we examined the situation of on-line consultation services. In order to compare Japan with foreign countries, and 1995 with 1996, we analyzed the numbers of e-mails sent by users to web-master in two months (Sep. and Oct.) by each year and geographical situation.
The number of e-mails was 31 in 1995 and 100 in 1996. There were little differences in numbers of e mail sent from Japan and foreign countries. Web-master could cope with many e-mails and interact with users in the world directly. The result showed the effective use of SenSui for worldwide interaction.
There were many e-mails including the article of link information or the inquiry of materials or reports or resources. E-mails on Individual consultation about disability was little in the season. However, we think this is important for user and actually web-master has received many kinds of requests in the world and tried to cope with them.
In this chapter we would like to describe three points which is necessary for the future advance of disability resources on the Internet. At two points, we explain other detailed information of projects in which we started and have still engaged in Japan.
Web pages on disability have been increasing in number like any other web resources. The systematic organization of these resources is becoming necessary. In the future, we would need more cooperation to provide comprehensive and systematic provision of information.
We have started a project called CHIME[5] in July 1996. The purpose of the project is to give a cooperation network among disability-related web-masters. Currently16 members attend to the project and have tried to arrange the disability resources in Japan.
The second point is the use of the Internet in the process of solving problems which persons with disabilities and those who help the disabled have in their social lives. We believe that a lot of solution options are provided from experts dispersed worldly via telecommunications, if they are hooked to the Internet.
To serve the purpose, two of the authors and concerned staff of Japanese Association of Rehabilitation for the Visually Impaired (JARVI) launched information networking projects[6]. As a project, a mailing list named "jarvi-ml" has been running for a year, to which anyone who concerns the visual disability can attend.
There have been a lot of discussions about wide variety of subjects ranging from assistive technology to daily living. Especially, web access by the blind has been a hot topic. Much information about Lynx or other web access by and for the blind has been exchanged frequently. Some members implemented the systems with which user can get web pages by e-mail and examined the effectiveness by the blind subjects[7].
In March 1997, another project named "internet seminar" will take place, which calls concerned people from all over Japan and learn know-hows in installation and manipulation of the Internet and assistive technologies for the visual disability. In the seminar, blind and low vision users also participate and bring their PCs for installation.
We have no worldwide collaboration project so far. However, it seems quite obvious that cooperation is necessary among key figures around the world in order to collect and disseminate disability resources more systematically and usefully. The Internet should give us the common ground to build such a cooperation system. It is also important to have careful consideration into the users in countries where less technology is available.
We reported the web-page "SenSui" and examined its effectiveness. Results pointed out the importance of interactive and worldwide exchange of disability-related information. In the future, will needed more and more cooperation among web-masters of increasing number of pages. We would like to continue managing the page and search for other possibilities to facilitate information exchanges in the area of disabilities.
[2]
http://ww w.dais.is.tohoku.ac.jp/~iwan/handicap_res_eng.html
[3]
http://www.
gsa.gov/coca/WWWcode.h tm
[4]
http://tra ce.wisc.edu/text/guidelns/htmlgide/htmlgide.html
[5]
http://k
eisys.tutpse.tut .ac.jp/~imura/chime/
[6]
http://www.twcu.ac.jp/~k-oda/VIRN/
[7]
http://komei1.kou mei
sfh.setagaya.tokyo.jp/~8mou/#4
ó