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This study aims to investigate the perceptional differences of key stakeholders in assessing the Digital Library Accessibility and Usability Guidelines (DLAUG), in which design information is created and organized by types of help-seeking situations, to support blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The stakeholders consist of BVI users, digital library (DL) developers and scholars/experts. The focus is on the identification of types of situations in which BVI users and developers show significant perception differences of DLAUG’s relevance, clarity and usefulness than the other two groups, respectively, and the associated reasons.

An in-depth survey was conducted to examine the perceptions of 150 participants representing three groups of key DL stakeholders: BVI users, DL developers and scholars/experts. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were applied.

The results show that BVI users and developers had significant perception differences of the relevance, clarity and usefulness of the DLAUG than the other two groups held on five situations, mainly because they played distinct roles in the development of DLs with differing goals and expectations for the DL design guidelines.

This is the first study that considers different DL stakeholders to assess DL guidelines to support BVI users.

The purpose of this research is to facilitate the full potential of the web for the people with disabilities. People with disabilities may fail to make full use of the potentials offered by the web even if they have the right hardware (computer and assistive technologies) as well as access to the internet because of the lack of accessibility.

This research outlines the guidelines that provide the foundation for building an accessibility-aware framework approach, where people with disabilities can access most of the electronic contents based on their disability levels.

The framework helps web engineers in developing accessible web pages for all types of users. Disability profile examples (blindness, low vision, deafness and hard of hearing) were taken to determine the performance of the framework approach.

The validation and testing was carried out on the Sultan Qaboos University website. The framework approach could be further validated by performing the tests on various other public and private websites.

The guidelines can be used as a road map to overcome accessibility challenges during any web application development life cycle. A proper testing and evaluation is carried out on the framework to test its usability.

Although people with disabilities are perhaps the segment of society which are expected to gain the most from these technologies, they are facing barriers to access the contents of the web because of the way it is presented. This proposed framework could assist all the people with the disability of blindness and hearing impairment to have a better experience with the internet, making the technology more beneficial and usable to them. In the future, this approach can be extended for the people with other disabilities.

This research provides a pioneering concept for accessibility-aware framework approach. This approach could be utilized for developing accessible web applications and electronic services for people with disabilities. The proposed framework can be used as a road map to overcome accessibility challenges during any web application development life cycle.

Despite the widespread use of authentication schemes and the rapid emergence of novel authentication schemes, a general set of domain-specific guidelines has not yet been developed. This paper aims to present and explain a list of human-centered guidelines for developing usable authentication schemes.

The guidelines stem from research findings within the fields of psychology, human–computer interaction and information/computer science.

Instead of viewing users as the inevitable weak point in the authentication process, this study proposes that authentication interfaces be designed to take advantage of users’ natural abilities. This approach requires that one understands how interactions with authentication interfaces can be improved and what human capabilities can be exploited. A list of six guidelines that designers ought to consider when developing a new usable authentication scheme has been presented.

This consolidated list of usable authentication guidelines provides system developers with immediate access to common design issues impacting usability. These guidelines ought to assist designers in producing more secure products in fewer costly development cycles.

Cybersecurity research and development has mainly focused on technical solutions to increase security. However, the greatest weakness of many systems is the user. It is argued that authentication schemes with poor usability are inherently insecure, as users will inadvertently weaken the security in their efforts to use the system. The study proposes that designers need to consider the human factors that impact end-user behavior. Development from this perspective will address the greatest weakness in most security systems by increasing end-user compliance.

Databases on CDROM are one of the more complex types of facility that will be accessed by the general public, either in their home, in airport lounges and other public arenas or in libraries. These databases extend over a wide range of different media types including bibliographic, full‐text and multimedia. Interfaces include DOS‐based and GUI‐based products. This paper reviews the literature on the design and evaluation of user interfaces on CDROM, with the objective of distilling guidelines for these activities. More specifically the article defines interfaces, dialogues and interaction, and explores the diversity in and issues associated with standardisation in interface design for CDROMs. Current criteria and guidelines for the evaluation of CDROM interfaces include those of the Special Interest Group on CDROM Applications and Technology (SIGCAT) and guidelines proposed by other authors. Using this earlier work as a basis an alternative set of guidelines is proposed.

The level of security of home information systems can be described as their capacity to resist all the accidental or deliberate malicious activities based on the evaluation assurance levels (EAL) as defined in international standards. The purpose of this paper is to propose a security guideline tool for home users based on the implementation of a protection profile (PP) for home user systems.

The application was developed in three basic steps. First, a PP for home user systems was created on the basis of the international standard ISO/IEC 15408. Then, the paper created a knowledge base including the PP information, as well as a security policy including other international standards, as mentioned above. Finally, the paper created a web application tool to be used as a security guideline for home users.

This tool is developed in order to support users to understand the threats which affect their environment and select the appropriate security policy. By using this tool, users can access information about international standards in accordance to their level of knowledge.

The authors created a tool based on EAL4. In the future, tools based on EAL1, EAL2, and EAL3 can be created easily on the basis of the present model.

This PP specifies the security requirements for home user information technology (IT) environments, and makes use of the Department of Defense information assurance guidelines and policies as a basis for establishing the requirements necessary for meeting the security objectives. This PP is constructed for use as a reference for home users to create safe home IT environments. Operating systems evaluated against this PP can operate at EAL4.

The purpose of this research study was to seek new forms of public libraries helping with the integration of migrants. It comprises a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliographic review and an empirical study involving the librarians and native and migrant users of public libraries in Spain leading to the design of guidelines for library services targeted at migrant users that can help foster the integration of this group of the population.

The bibliographic review analyses studies of whether migrant users see the public library as a place of meeting and interchange as well as a fundamental institution providing them with services, meeting their information requirements and offering them challenges and projects. The empirical investigation contrasts this theoretical information by administering three questionnaires (one for librarians, one for native users and one for migrant users, with a total of 45 items) focused on the relationship between public libraries and migration. A total of 20 public libraries over the territory of Spain were selected in accordance with diverse criteria, and a total of 233 completed questionnaires were collected.

The main results of the empirical research indicate that the greatest proportion of migrant users go to Spain’s public libraries on the recommendation of friends and/or relatives. They use them mainly as a place of study, visiting them at least twice a week, even though the representation of collections and specific services for this group is very sparse (only 5% of the collection of the libraries analysed are in a foreign language). On the other hand, the satisfaction expressed towards both the general services of the libraries and the help provided by their librarians is scored highly, getting mean scores of 4.45 and 4.40 out of 5, respectively.

This work not only includes an exhaustive bibliographic review of the relationship between public libraries and migrant users and an empirical investigation carried out in Spain with librarians, native users and migrant users, but also presents a decalogue of guidelines for the design of a range of services focused on the specific needs of the migrant population, thus favouring their integration in the host country.

The quality of clinical care is a fundamental issue for both providers and recipients. It seems logical for the parties to collaborate. Increasing understanding of each other's values and perceived needs with commitment to incorporating both users' and clinicians' unique perspectives on clinical quality and effectiveness is a new venture which will further contribute to improving the quality of health care in the NHS.

E‐learning is becoming a major component in academia today. Therefore, the success of e‐learning online communities is crucial in order to ensure their permanency and effectiveness. There is a need for formalized guidelines in e‐learning that instruct the designer (course instructor) on how to design, maintain, and manage a course. Some research has been done on the subject, but none proposes formalized guidelines, and none draws the results from the users’ perspectives. The users, students in this case, should be at the heart of the design and their thoughts, wishes, and needs should be implemented in the user‐centered design. In this study, through an iterative testing approach, the researchers formalized and validated a set of design heuristics that instruct an online educator on how to design, manage, deliver, and nurture an e‐Learning online community.

Service robotics, a branch of robotics that entails the development of robots able to assist humans in their environment, is of growing interest in the hospitality industry. Designing effective autonomous service robots, however, requires an understanding of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), a relatively young discipline dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans. HRI has not yet received sufficient attention in hospitality robotic design, much like Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) in property management system design in the 1980s. This article proposes a set of introductory HRI guidelines with implementation standards for autonomous hospitality service robots.

A set of key user-centered HRI guidelines for hospitality service robots were extracted from 52 research articles. These are organized into service performance categories to provide more context for their application in hospitality settings.

Based on an extensive literature review, this article presents some HRI guidelines that may drive higher levels of acceptance of service robots in customer-facing situations. Deriving meaningful HRI guidelines requires an understanding of how customers evaluate service interactions with humans in hospitality settings and to what degree those will differ with service robots.

Robots are challenging assumptions on how hospitality businesses operate. They are being increasingly deployed by hotels and restaurants to boost productivity and maintain service levels. Effective HRI guidelines incorporate user requirements and expectations in the design specifications. Compilation of such information for designers of hospitality service robots will offer a clearer roadmap for them to follow.

This paper starts by reporting the results of two studies into electronic book production, the Visual Book and the WEB Book. The Visual Book study (Landoni, 1997) explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books, while the WEB Book study (Wilson, 1999) took the findings of the Visual Book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the WWW. It was possible to extract from the two experiences a set of recommendations for producing electronic books. These are the starting point for a new project, EBONI (Electronic Books ON‐screen Interface). EBONI focuses on the evaluation of electronic resources for teaching and learning in academia and it is going to expand our previous findings with the aim of producing a set of guidelines for publishing educational material on the Web.