Multimodal web applications: design issues and an implementation framework

摘要

Even with recent advances in mark-up languages, content generation, content transformation tools, and the architecture of multimodal browsers, it is still complex to design, implement and deploy a multimodal web application. A key reason is the absence of an end-to-end solution dealing with all aspects of multimodal web application development. This paper presents the main design issues that are associated with multimodal web applications and proposes a unifying framework for the end-to-end design and implementation of components that support multimodal web applications. It is illustrated that the framework uses existing, standards-based, multi-tier technologies to provide multimodal browsing, content access and transformation, multimodal authoring, and personalisation. Two web applications using this framework are described with results from their evaluation. Furthermore, we position the introduced solution with respect to related state-of-the-art initiatives such as X+V and SALT and show that it addresses several of these design issues.