Segnalo Farfalla project, un progetto ideato e realizzato da Andrea Mangiatordi insieme a Riccardo Dondi. Ho il piacere di collaborare con Andrea, anche lui dottorando in Bicocca, all’interno delle attività di ricerca promosse da NuMedia BiOs. Si tratta di un web tool dedicato all’accessibilità, a testimonianza del fatto che spesso il “digital divide” non è semplicemente un problema di banda larga…

Farfalla is a web-application, first developed and discussed in a thesis for a second level degree in Communication and Multimedia Publishing. The project offically began in September 2006. It is now the main subject of a personal Ph.D. research project at the University of Milan-Bicocca.This kind of work originated by the realization that Information Technology is not only an unreplaceable component in office work, but it is also a good resource for supporting many everyday life situations.

In most cases technology has revealed itself useful for the realization of an assistive device that allow disabled people to partly or fully overcome their disabilities derived from various impairments, originated from pathologies or by traumas.But software like non-visual web browsers, to cite a well-known example, need to work in a standardized environment to reach the best performance level. Thus, the environment itself has to adapt and adhere to well defined accessibility and usability criteria.

To this aim there is a wide documentation produced by relevant authorities (e.g. the W3C) to which web-sites builders and owners have to respect in order to make the fruition of the contents they ship usable to all their visitors, were they using visual or non visual web browsers.This work, which has lead to the development of Farfalla, is based on the new technologies of information transmission and management which characterise the web, even if it starts from a sligtly different point of view.

The original idea was to create an instrument which was highly portable and could be used on every internet-connected device. It is based on a simplified writing tool, built using the same languages and techniques that websites are made of. The keybord is used in an unusual way as a controlling device, making the composition of texts possible, requiring low effort and maintaining an acceptable writing speed.Farfalla is free software: its source code can be read and modified, and everybody can take part in its development.

The user interface, which aims to be as simple and intuitive as possible, can be used through the internet, independently by the computer in use. It is not necessary to install anything except a common web browser to enjoy its functionalities: it allows to the creation of documents, their storage into a database and their printing through simple and fast commands.At the core of this work there is the fieldwork. It involved an active role with a disabled person in the software development. Her collaboration allowed us to re-define the objectives and the priorities of the initial project during its development. She pointed out new perspectives to be assumed.

Thanks to this, we faced the problems which came out during the first implementation phase in a better way. The decision to involve a disabled person in the very first part of the project was inspired by the principles of the disability studies, which can be summarized into the motto “nothing about us without us”.

Watch a video illustrating the new features of Farfalla!