Augmenting Social Media Accessibility Roberto Borrino, Marco Furini , Marco Roccetti matrixbob@tin.it Department of Computer Science, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy [email_address] Department of Social Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy [email_address] Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy Hello everybody!

Why Social Media? . Communication Media Built on the set of Internet technologies grouped under the label Web 2.0 Provide new opportunities for sharing and discussing information among human beings Change the way communication, collaboration, interaction, and information are consumed and produced Social Media

Social Media Landscape Decentralized, user friendly, and easily sharable for the average citizen. Mainly based on Web 2.0 technologies and include blogs, vblogs, podcast, SMS, video communication, social networks, wikies, … Social Media

Social Media Popularity Google Yahoo! YouTube Facebook Windows Live MSN Wikipedia Blogger.com Myspace Baidu Top Sites Alexa source (April 17, 2009) Social Media will overtake traditional media

Google

Yahoo!

YouTube

Facebook

Windows Live

MSN

Wikipedia

Blogger.com

Myspace

Baidu

Social Media Accessibility There is a widening generation gap between adolescents growing up with social technology and adults who find it foreign and unsettling Amanda Gefter Living online: This is your space New Scientist, September 2006 Most social media are mainly designed for people without any limitation either geographical, physical, economical or technological it is necessary to augment social media accessibility. Social media should be available to the largest possible audience

SOMFA: Social Media For All SOMFA focuses on: making social media available through mass-media TV (and not only through the Web, as the Web can be a burden for a part of the society) adapting social media contents so as to offer a multi-modal (i.e., aural and visual) content presentation SOMFA provides a multi-modal presentation of social media contents (aural and visual) and organizes such contents in order to be displayed on TV sets

SOMFA focuses on:

making social media available through mass-media TV (and not only through the Web, as the Web can be a burden for a part of the society)

adapting social media contents so as to offer a multi-modal (i.e., aural and visual) content presentation

SOMFA: Portability SOMFA can be used to augment the accessibility of any social media, provided that social media contents are available in Web syndication formats Designed to be as portable as possible Instead of focusing on specific social media, SOMFA relies on standards used to keep people update, i.e. the Web syndication formats (RSS and ATOM)

SOMFA Architecture

SOMFA: the Crawler Crawler task Find and download Web contents specified in the feed list The list of feeds represents the interests of the user Download possible multimedia contents that are linked in the downloaded feeds

Crawler task

Find and download Web contents specified in the feed list

The list of feeds represents the interests of the user

Download possible multimedia contents that are linked in the downloaded feeds

SOMFA: the Miner Miner task: Parse all the feeds downloaded by the crawler Extract information contained in the feeds Extract information of where to locate multimedia contents (e.g., pictures, audio, or video) and pass them to the crawler module for actual downloading

Miner task:

Parse all the feeds downloaded by the crawler

Extract information contained in the feeds

Extract information of where to locate multimedia contents (e.g., pictures, audio, or video) and pass them to the crawler module for actual downloading

SOMFA: the Miner

SOMFA: the Coder Coder task: avoid the creation of new ostracism forms with regards to users with physical disabilities, who are unable to (fully) enjoy social media transcode text-based information (title and description) of any news into vocal form use an external text-to-speech software module to produce the vocal form resize the downloaded pictures if the resolution goes beyond 384x288 (i.e., the portion of the TV screen that will be used to display images)

Coder task:

avoid the creation of new ostracism forms with regards to users with physical disabilities, who are unable to (fully) enjoy social media

transcode text-based information (title and description) of any news into vocal form

use an external text-to-speech software module to produce the vocal form

resize the downloaded pictures if the resolution goes beyond 384x288 (i.e., the portion of the TV screen that will be used to display images)

SOMFA: the Coder Why an external module to do text-to-speech? To enhance portability and customization It is possible to use opensource software (e.g., text2speech, Festival Speech Synthesis System), or commercial products (e.g., Loquendo tts) Currently, the DSpeech freeware software is used

Why an external module to do text-to-speech?

To enhance portability and customization

It is possible to use opensource software (e.g., text2speech, Festival Speech Synthesis System), or commercial products (e.g., Loquendo tts)

Currently, the DSpeech freeware software is used

SOMFA: the Producer Producer task: Organization of downloaded and transcoded contents so as to watch them on TV Production of an audio/video MPEG stream Production of an AVS script

Producer task:

Organization of downloaded and transcoded contents so as to watch them on TV

Production of an audio/video MPEG stream

Production of an AVS script

SOMFA: the Producer

SOMFA: the Producer

SOMA: an example

SOMA: an example

SOMFA: Fields of Application Richiesta Audio/Video stream SOMFA client DVB-T SOMFA client DVB-H Request SOMFA SOMFA server Audio/Video script

Conclusions Augment social media accessibility Transcode information Bring social media contents outside the Web

Contact Information For any information, question or just for a comment, please, email me at: [email_address]