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There are many methods for testing accessibility and universal design, ranging from checklists and guidelines to automated testing and finally to human testing with participants from different user groups. It is, however, not straight forward to determine how a testing method relates to impairments and barriers. In this work we have expanded the W3C cognitive barriers from one category to four categories in order to provide a better overview of cognitive barriers and testing methods. We also present an overview of multiple existing accessibility testing methods and what kind of barriers they cover. Finally, we present a recommendation on how to select a collection of accessibility testing methods in order to cover the broadest range of disabilities. Our focus is tools that can empower and ease work processes of software development teams, including both developers and testers. This work has been supported by the ITIK project funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs in the UnIKT program, grant number 62127.

It is essential to focus on universal design in agile software development to ensure that the software developed is usable by as many people as possible. This work studies how members of agile teams regard universal design, how the team is organized to focus on universal design, and how the team practices universal design. We have questioned 89 members of agile software projects including developers, tester, designers and project leaders. We present a detailed breakdown of the results based on roles, domains, experience and other factors that explain the differences and similarities among teams. Our findings show that there is a significant difference between what members think, what management think and what members actually do to ensure universal design.

It is important to include accessibility testing in software development to ensure that the software developed is usable by as many people as possible, independent of their capabilities. Few guidelines exist on how to include accessibility testing in an agile process, and how to select testing methods from a cost-benefit point of view. The end result is that many development teams do not include accessibility testing, since they do not know how to prioritize the different testing methods within a tight budget. In this paper, we present an evaluation of nine accessibility testing methods that fits in an agile software development process. We discuss the cost of each method with regards to resources and knowledge requirements, and based on a cost-benefit analysis, we present an optimal combination of these methods in terms of cost and issues discovered. Finally, we describe how accessibility testing methods can be incorporated into an agile process by using the agile accessibility spiral.

We developed a concept including a set of tools for self-management for patients suffering from axial spondy-loarthritis (SpA). This concept involves patient-recorded outcome measures, both subjective assessment and clinical measurements,that are used to present recommendations. We report from experiences made while implementing a proof of this concept.Besides giving the patient a self-management tool, our work also improved the methodology for clinical measurements.

The bag of words representation of documents is often unsat- isfactory as it ignores relationships between important terms that do not co-occur literally. Improvements might be achieved by expanding the vocabulary with other relevant word, like synonyms. In this paper we use word-word co-occurence information from a large corpus to expand the vocabulary of another corpus consisting of tweets. Several different methods on how to include the co-occurence information are constructed and tested out on the classification of real twitter data. Our results show that we are able to reduce the number of erroneous classifications by 14% using co-occurence information.

Sentiment lexicons are the most used tool to automatically predict sentiment in text. To the best of our knowledge, there exist no openly available sentiment lexicons for the Norwegian language. Thus in this paper we applied two different strategies to automatically generate sentiment lexicons for the Norwegian language. The first strategy used machine translation to translate an English sentiment lexicon to Norwegian and the other strategy used information from three different thesauruses to build several sentiment lexicons. The lexicons based on thesauruses were built using the Label propagation algorithm from graph theory. The lexicons were evaluated by classifying product and movie reviews. The results show satisfying classification performances. Different sentiment lexicons perform well on product and on movie reviews. Overall the lexicon based on machine translation performed the best, showing that linguistic resources in English can be translated to Norwegian without losing significant value.

This thesis focuses on IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distribution Channel Access (EDCA). IEEE 802.11e was standardized in July 2005, and there are already numerous papers about 802.11e and its applications. Even so, there are still many untouched issues regarding 802.11e EDCA, and this thesis will try to answer some of those issues. The interoperation between Differentiated Services (DiffServ) and 802.11e EDCA is one of the issues explored in this thesis. Several architectures and mapping schemes for the interoperation between DiffServ and 802.11e are discussed and evaluated together with simulation results. Our work presents a very interesting finding regarding the rate configuration of 802.11e classes and the drop probability of these. These results make us question if 802.11e EDCA is designed to interoperate correctly with DiffServ. Another important issue that we have explored is admission control mechanisms for 802.11e EDCA. The IEEE 802.11e standard assumes implementation of admission control, but no specific algorithm is specified. Admission control is an important supplement to the differentiation features of 802.11 EDCA. An admission control unit is also necessary in an interoperation environment between DiffServ and 802.11e EDCA. Both measurement and model based admission control algorithms are presented and discussed. As an enhancement to one of the most promising measurement based algorithms, we propose a new and enhanced admission control algorithm. We also propose a model based admission control algorithm, which uses delay instead of throughput as its threshold, which is quite unique compared to existing proposals. Our two new proposals are evaluated by simulations.