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The paper focuses on the design and creation of public green spaces and the methodology of assessment of their accessibility. A barrier-free environment is such an environment which enables an independent and safe access, as well as a full use and an unassisted move for all individuals. Under the terms of the creation of a barrier-free environment, an evaluation methodology has been elaborated, which focuses mainly on the assessment of a barrier-free accessibility of green spaces, roads, site furniture and barrier-free playgrounds. The evaluation has been carried out in the housing estate Chrenová in Nitra (Slovakia), which was built in the 1970s, with a plenty of open space for greenery. Based on the evaluation results, we can conclude that the best parameter is the relief of the area since it is a mostly flat terrain. On the contrary, the largest deficiencies have been found in the amount of greenery and its accessibility, as well as in the quality of pavement surface. Weaknesses were identified especially in terms of sidewalk parameters and pavement surfaces. The results of park furniture assessment reflect especially a poor technical condition of benches and a lack of green space facilities. The most deficiencies were detected on children playgrounds that do not fulfil the criteria of barrier-free accessibility. Based on the results of evaluation, measures for quality improvement of barrier-free environments have been proposed. Within the measures, areas suitable for the location of objects for passive and active garden therapy have been proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive infocommunications (CogInfoCom) is one of the emerging areas of research. Future internet is in synergistic relationship with Coginfocom and covers areas like Internet of Things (IoT) and the three-dimensional internet (3D). Research in Virtual Reality Systems (VR) is in connection with these fields. The aim of this paper is the demonstration of personal working environments for people with special needs or disabilities. These people can be quite restricted in their mobility so it might be difficult to integrate them into everyday working environment. One of the state of art solutions for that problem is to create special 3D environments in which the physical surroundings of the subject is combined with representations of virtual reality. These tools can provide people with the ability to join in the workflow of a company by using special devices as collaboration tools in their work. The above mentioned tools can also be applied for the ergonomic testing and trying out of special office equipments for their needs in 3D Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE). In this paper the presentation of two different virtual working environments (rooms) in Virtual Collaboration Arena (VirCA) are described and demonstrated. For the modeling of these environments Trimble SketchUp 8 (3D modeling program) and Blender (3D computer graphics software) was used. VirCA is the tool for visualization of the virtual working environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many countries are facing an aging population and are looking for solutions to the problem of providing affordable care services. One of the first countries to face this challenge is Japan and their industry has embraced the development of a range of technology solutions. Unfortunately much of the technology being developed is likely to be unaffordable to many citizens. A parallel development underway in many parts of the world is the focus on energy efficiency with many low cost meters aimed at the residential market available. The data that is collected by these meters is likely to be a proxy for the health of single occupant residences and thus offers a potential low cost solution to the monitoring the elderly and disabled. A third major development currently underway is the rise of so called cloud computing services. This is the last piece to the puzzle as it is now possible to easily and cheaply deploy 'always on' applications that can monitor the electricity data and make intelligent decisions to alert those that need to know the status of the elderly. This work demonstrates the implementation of such a service using currently available 'off-the-shelf technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to compare mental focus onset levels between physically abled and disabled people. Forty subjects from each group were given a concentration-intensive task in the form of an iPhone game, while their brain activities were recorded using Electroencephalography (EEG). Attention levels were monitored through EEG data extracted from the pre-frontal cortical location. Attention shifts from low to high attention levels correlating with task-onset periods were analyzed. Results show no significant difference in attention shifts between physically abled and disabled subjects. The results of this study provide evidence that brain-focus abilities of the physically disabled are comparable with people without disabilities. This study also helps in supporting greater credibility of assistive brain-computer-interface technology research on normal subjects as proxy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main aim of this study was to examine whether there are differences in the LA accumulation in disabled swimmers belonging to the lower classes, higher classes and those without functional disability. The sample was made up of 38 swimmers, 10 disabled swimmers from classes 1 to 5 (G1), 9 swimmers from classes 6 to 10 (G2) and 10 swimmers without functional disability (G3). The swimmers performed two bouts of swimming: one anaerobic and the other aerobic-anaerobic. The Anova showed significant differences between the groups (p<0.005). Finally, in anaerobic and aerobic-anaerobic intensities, the swimmers of the lower classes have a lower LA accumulation than the swimmers from higher classes and the swimmers without any functional impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question It is evident in today's technologically evolving marketplace that more and more commerce is being transacted online; however, this particular channel poses more challenges for the disabled community due to the inaccessibility of so many retail websites. To obtain perspectives from this population, a sample of blind and vision impaired consumers were used to gauge anti-firm behaviors such as negative word of mouth, avoidance, complaining, and third party complaining following an accessibility-related service failure online, and what negative emotions may mediate these reactions. The moderating effects of effort and whether or not the consumer believes his or her complaint will make a difference were also tested. To illustrate the breadth of this problem of online inaccessibility, we evaluated the top 100 retailers in 2014 (as per the National Federation of Retailers) for their conformance to accepted accessibility standards for online commercial websites. By revealing both the anti-firm reactions of the online consumers directly affected, and the widespread nature of the problem, the objective of the present research is to revitalize the dialogue to amend the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to include accessibility provisions for retail websites establishing equal access for disabled consumers. Method and Data Ninety-four blind and vision impaired participants were recruited for this test study from members of the local chapters of the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the National Federation of the Blind using an electronic snowball sampling technique. The survey was developed using slightly modified versions of literature established scales: Complaint Behavior (Cronbach's Alpha = .903), Third-Party Complaint Behavior (C.A. = .805), Switching (C.A. = .860), Complaint Success Likelihood (C.A. = .733), Anger (C.A. = 0.960); and Avoidance (C.A. = .910). The "Sort-Site" evaluation tool was used to test the accessibility of each website against the globally accepted World Wide Web Consortium 2.0 Guidelines which designates three levels of design flaws or errors that make it extremely difficult or impossible for someone using assistive technology to navigate websites. To determine the percentage of inaccessible content for the retail websites, we calculated the number of pages with errors out of the total number of pages available. We then tested the number of design flaws or errors on the home page, the transaction page, and on a random selection of the first twenty pages with accessibility problems. Summary of Findings The results show that accessibility-related service failures online lead to avoidance behaviors (mean = 5.08, and this effect is mediated by the negative emotion of anger (p-value = 0.000). Additionally, accessibility-related service failures online lead to negative word of mouth (mean = 4.74), and this effect is mediated by anger toward the retailer (pvalue = .003). The preliminary analysis indicates that accessibility-related service failures online will not lead to third-party complaining (mean = 3.27). These pretest results show that the effect is moderated by consumer feelings (likelihood) about whether the complaint will resolve the problem for avoidance (p-value = .021) and negative word of mouth (p-value = .016), but not for third party complaining (p-value = .554). Testing the correlation between the likelihood of a consumer complaining directly to the retailer and the feelings about whether the complaint will resolve the problem, we found a positive but not large correlation (r = .287) between these two variables. Finally, we found that the mean for the high effort condition (mean = 5.26) is larger compared to the low effort condition (mean = 4.9), and a paired t-test for a difference in means between the two conditions was highly significant (p-value = 0.0003). The evaluation of the retail websites showed many critical priority A and AA errors, and these errors appeared throughout the entirety of all retailer websites. There were no websites free from critical priority A and AA errors. However, critically important to this research, many errors appeared on the most heavily trafficked pages including the homepage, and the transaction page. Key Contributions In today's multichannel online and off-line retailing environments, sellers cannot afford to have any of their channels inaccessible to any potential market. By elucidating a problem affecting an expanding market of more than 30 million U.S. consumers, our research suggests a potential competitive opportunity exists for multi-channel sellers to better serve the oftentimes underserved blind and visionimpaired consumers. Whether due to low switching costs or feelings that their complaints will not remedy the situation, our pretest results show that disabled customers who experience an accessibility-related service failure online are unlikely to report the problem to the retailer. As ever more shopping is transacted online combined with the growing disabled population, businesses can benefit by making sure that blind and vision-impaired consumers are able to successfully navigate their websites and complete transactions. Our research findings demonstrate that manifest problems exist with many commercial websites, and that a large, growing consumer segment is adversely affected leading to lost profits. We hope these preliminary findings provoke further discussion about the competitive advantages for progressive retailers in taking the initiative to create more inclusive websites for this underserved market prior to the consideration of an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the toolkit ASED: Assistive System Experiment Designer. Combining a specially constructed assembly table and new software it allows measuring the performance of impaired persons when using assistive systems for production environments (ASiPE). The ASiPE design tested using ASED transgresses the state of the art by three enhancements. With the help of ASED we are able to quantify and rank their effects on work quality and performance. The ASED toolkit, however, is not confined to the design tested but can be used for the experimental analysis of every kind of manual process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]