Design and Evaluation of Accessible Collaborative Writing Techniques for People with Vision Impairments

Collaborative writing tools have been used widely in professional and academic organizations for many years. Yet, there has not been much work to improve screen reader access in mainstream collaborative writing tools. This severely affects the way people with vision impairments collaborate in ability-diverse teams. As a step toward addressing this issue, the present article aims at improving screen reader representation of collaborative features such as comments and track changes (i.e., suggested edits). Building on our formative interviews with 20 academics and professionals with vision impairments, we developed auditory representations that indicate comments and edits using non-speech audio (e.g., earcons, tone overlay), multiple text-to-speech voices, and contextual presentation techniques. We then performed a systematic evaluation study with 48 screen reader users that indicated that non-speech audio, changing voices, and contextual presentation can potentially improve writers’ collaboration awareness. We discuss implications of these results for the design of accessible collaborative systems.

Privacy-preserving policy evaluation in multi-party access control

Recent years have seen an increasing popularity of online collaborative systems like social networks and web-based collaboration platforms. Collaborative systems typically offer their users a digital environment in which they can work together and share resources and information. These resources and information might be sensitive and, thus, they should be protected from unauthorized accesses. Multi-party access control is emerging as a new paradigm for the protection of co-owned and co-managed resources, where the policies of all users involved in the management of a resource should be accounted for collaborative decision making. Existing approaches, however, only focus on the jointly protection of resources and do not address the protection of the individual user policies themselves, whose disclosure might leak sensitive information. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving mechanism for the evaluation of multi-party access control policies, which preserves the confidentiality of user policies while remaining capable of making collaborative decisions. To this end, we design secure computation protocols for the evaluation of policies in protected form against an access query and realize such protocols using two privacy-preserving techniques, namely Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Functional Evaluation. We show the practical feasibility of our mechanism in terms of computation and communication costs through an experimental evaluation.

Diplomatic Collaborative Solutions to Assure the Adoption of the European Single Market Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

As the COVID-19 crisis has shown, the lack of harmonized and coordinated actions superseding national borders represented a limit to the full implementation of already existing legal binding instruments at the European level. It is recognized that the existing levels of globalization have contributed to accelerate the large-scale transmission of viruses and increased the likelihood of a pandemic public health crisis. This article aims to highlight the importance of greater bilateral cooperation to mitigate the health and economic impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It focuses on the implementation of diplomatic collaborative systems to assure the full implementation of the European single market as well as the adoption of standardized health information platforms as a part of pandemic preparedness and control measures.

Distrust, Identification and Collaboration Effectiveness in Multiparty Systems

Multiparty collaborative systems are created to tackle important societal challenges, yet studies that investigate the relational dynamics of such systems remain scant. Our study explores the role of distrust within and between parties, as well as identification with one’s own party, in the collaborative effectiveness of such multiparty systems (MPS). We use a behavioral simulation context in which distrust, identification, and collaboration effectiveness are assessed at three moments in time: namely, at the onset of the MPS (expectations related to within and between group interactions), during the interactions, and at the end of the simulation. The simulation was played 11 times with different groups, as part of an organization development program for a large organization. We show that high initial expectations of distrust between parties decrease collaboration effectiveness over time, while identification with one’s party has a positive influence on collaboration effectiveness. Moreover, our results show that distrust between parties interacts with distrust within parties in such a way that the highest level of collaboration effectiveness is reported by parties with low within-group distrust and low between-party distrust. The lowest collaboration effectiveness is reported by parties with low within-group distrust and high levels of between-party distrust.