Search results

Millions of visually impaired people (VIP) in the world still face difficulties browsing the Web and accessing information. This paper aims to present a proxy service that takes advantage of the concept of context-aware to help contextualizing web pages for visually impaired users.

The VIP-aware proxy combines five components to utilize the user preferences, adapts the requested web page and reorganizes its content to best match the preferences set by the user. This new scenario will assist VIP in browsing the Web more effectively.

A preliminary evaluation of the system resulted in general user satisfaction.

The VIP-aware proxy will provide users with a clean, accessible web page, save them time when screen readers examine content related to their preferences and save them money when unnecessary content is not downloaded.

The VIP-aware proxy presented in this paper is the first of its kind targeting VIP.

This study aims to analyze Saudi scientific output in the field of computer science in Web of Science database, covering the years 1978 through 2012.

The study involved analyzing 998 publications in terms of the publication count and its growth, citation, share of international collaboration, research areas and researchers’ productivity.

The results show that the number of papers produced in computer science field has only increased after year 2007; this is because Saudi universities have applied a catch-up strategy to increase its research output. Also, our study reveals that the publication performance of Saudi scientists in computer science was domestic and suffers from low international visibility. Only two universities took the lead in the production of computer science research. Furthermore, computer science research trends in Saudi Arabia focused on engineering, followed by mathematics and telecommunications.

Studies on international academic publication productivity in the Middle East, particularly in Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, are rarely found. In fact, bibliometric studies on Saudi researchers in the field of computer science are not available. Therefore, the originality of this study resides in being the first study to measure publication productivity of Saudi researchers in the field of computer science.

This paper aims to investigate accessibility and usage of mobile smartphones by Arabic-speaking visually impaired people in Saudi Arabia.

In total, 104 participants with visual impairments were interviewed about their use of mobile phones with the following questions: What is the most commonly used mobile phone? What is the popular domain for which they use mobile phones? What are their favorite applications? What accessibility challenges do they usually face while using mobile phones? How often do they use the Internet via mobile phones and what are the reasons behind that?

This research is the first study with such magnitude to investigate smartphone usage by Arabic-speaking visually impaired people. The survey has revealed that Arabic-speaking visually impaired people utilize mobile phones in different ways and strategies. Getting assistance in performing daily tasks and navigating independently are two of the most common uses for mobile phones.

Based on the findings, the authors are going to propose some guidelines to developers to improve smartphone accessibility, application design and Internet usage to improve accessibility for visually impaired people.

Owing to the large amount of information available on Twitter (a micro blogging service) that is not necessarily true or believable, credibility of news published in such an electronic channel has become an important area for investigation in the field of web credibility. This paper aims to address this issue.

A system was developed to measure the credibility of news content published in Twitter. The system uses two approaches to assign credibility levels (low, high and average) to each tweet. The first approach is based on the similarity between Twitter posts (tweets) and authentic (i.e. verified) news sources. The second approach is based on the similarity with verified news sources in addition to a set of proposed features.

The evaluations of the two approaches showed that assigning credibility levels to Twitter tweets for the first approach has a higher precision and recall. Additional experiments showed that the linking feature has its impact on the second approach results.

The proposed system is experimental; thus further experiments are needed to prove these findings.

This paper contributes to the research on web credibility. It is believed to be the first which provides a proposed system to evaluate the credibility of Twitter news content automatically.

Designing an effective university mobile website is becoming a necessity for universities. With the increasing percentage of students using smart phones to research colleges and universities, many university websites worldwide are moving towards addressing mobile needs. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive mobile university evaluation framework that can be used to assess how universities' websites respond to the increasing demand for the mobile web, and also to identify trends and gaps in current services provided in universities' mobile websites.

A framework was developed and applied to a set of 35 universities' mobile websites worldwide. The framework consists of four categories: interface, navigation, content and services offered, and technical aspects.

Evaluation findings show that most universities' mobile websites performed well in terms of mobile-friendliness and functionality; however, suggestions for future improvements are given.

No previous evaluation studies of this kind have been conducted. Moreover, this study provides an evaluation framework dedicated to the assessment of universities' mobile websites.

This study aims to understand the underlying social structure of Saudi citizens' interaction and discussion of political topics over the Twitter sphere.

The study employs social network analysis (SNA) measurements such as centrality, eigenvector and graph density on tweets produced in June 2012 by the Saudi community.

The result of SNA reveals relevant differences in the patterns of interconnection among different political topics. It also provides insights into sociological characteristics of modern political issues in Saudi Arabia.

The limitation of this study resides in the lack of large data set for robust analysis.

This is the first study aiming to understand social network dynamics of Twitter targeting the Saudi community.

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between two reporting mechanisms used by managers to communicate risk information to the capital market: risk disclosure and earnings smoothing.

This study juxtaposes two competing hypotheses, the “opportunistic” and the “signaling”, and empirically investigates whether one dominates the other for a sample of large UK firms for the period 2005–2015. This study also uses the global financial crisis as an arguably exogenous shock on overall risk in the economy to investigate its effect on managers' joint use of textual risk disclosures and earnings smoothing.

This study finds that risk disclosure and earnings smoothing are negatively associated. This finding supports that managers with incentives to mask the firm’s true underlying risk through smoothing earnings provide lower levels of risk-related disclosures. This study documents that the trade-off between risk disclosure and earnings smoothing is more pronounced during the global financial crisis period than before and after the crisis period. Further, this study demonstrates a more negative association for firms with higher volatility of cash flows. This negative association is robust to various model specifications, additional corporate governance related controls and an alternative measure of earnings smoothing.

The findings provide new empirical evidence about the association between risk disclosure and earnings smoothing and support the opportunistic hypothesis, especially when firms are faced with increased risk.

Digital transformation (DT) has created a number of significant opportunities and related alterations in consumers' behaviours. However, consumers differ in adopting DT. There is still a need to investigate consumer's capabilities and his/her perception of other customers that supports or hinders the DT process. This study aims to investigate human thinking capabilities (critical thinking, holistic thinking and creative thinking) as drivers of two specific types of outcomes: DT barriers and/or DT nurture. In addition, this research also examines the linkage between human capabilities (three types of thinking) and other customers' perception. Finally, it postulates that other customers' perception drives DT barriers and/or DT nurture.

Applying to the public, private and international banking sectors, 273 questionnaires were collected. The collected data was analysed using AMOS as well as the PROCESS macro.

The results showed that human thinking capabilities have different effects on DT barriers and nurture. While critical thinking has a significant effect on DT barriers, both holistic thinking and creative thinking have a significant effect on DT nurture. Other customers' perception construct has a significant effect on both DT barriers and nurture. In addition, only holistic thinking has an effect on other customers' perception.

This study advances knowledge in three ways. Firstly, it examined DT barriers and nurture as variables from the customer's perspective. Secondly, it examined each human thinking capability on DT barriers and nurture, giving more insights. Thirdly, it studied human thinking capabilities as one of the main factors that might affect other customers' perception and DT barriers and nurture, while most previous studies focused only on other customers' perception's impact on DT barriers and nurture.