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Usability evaluation of the South African National Accessibility Portal interactive voice response system

Published: 06 October 2008 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    One of the most prominent problems that persons with disabilities face in South Africa, is access to relevant disability related information. To address this need the South African National Accessibility Portal (NAP Portal) was developed, that enable people with disabilities to easily get access to information. However, most people in South Africa do not have access to adequate Internet facilities. To overcome this obstacle, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) engine was connected to the NAP Portal, which allows access to information through a telephony interface. The IVR engine and scripts guide the user through information categories on the portal to the desired information, which is then voiced out to the user. In this paper, we present the evaluation of the IVR system to determine how easy or difficult users experience the whole process of retrieving information via a telephone. A usability evaluation was performed on the current NAP IVR system. Furthermore, a heuristic evaluation was done on a new design of the NAP IVR system to determine whether the major problems, that were highlighted by an expert, are addressed in the new design. Inputs from both of these evaluations will be used to design the next version of the NAP IVR system.

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    Cited By

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    • (2023)What’s The Talk on VUI Guidelines? A Meta-Analysis of Guidelines for Voice User Interface DesignProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3571884.3597129(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
    • (2013)Using Participatory Crowdsourcing in South Africa to Create a Safer Living EnvironmentInternational Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks10.1155/2013/9071969:11(907196)Online publication date: Jan-2013
    • (2012)Evaluation of Voice-driven Web Application ArchitectureProceedings of the 2012 Eighth International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems10.1109/SITIS.2012.86(555-562)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2012
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    1. Usability evaluation of the South African National Accessibility Portal interactive voice response system

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      SAICSIT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology
      October 2008
      304 pages
      ISBN:9781605582863
      DOI:10.1145/1456659
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 06 October 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. IVR system
      2. heuristic evaluation
      3. usability evaluation

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      SAICSIT '08
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      • Microsoft

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      View all
      • (2023)What’s The Talk on VUI Guidelines? A Meta-Analysis of Guidelines for Voice User Interface DesignProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3571884.3597129(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
      • (2013)Using Participatory Crowdsourcing in South Africa to Create a Safer Living EnvironmentInternational Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks10.1155/2013/9071969:11(907196)Online publication date: Jan-2013
      • (2012)Evaluation of Voice-driven Web Application ArchitectureProceedings of the 2012 Eighth International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems10.1109/SITIS.2012.86(555-562)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2012
      • (2009)Accessibility perspectives on enabling South African sign language in the South African national accessibility portalProceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)10.1145/1535654.1535668(62-65)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2009

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