Qualitative Evaluation of Multimedia Contents for Different Media Types and Media Quality

Universal Multimeia Access

The digital divide is caused by the differences in users’ personal competences, computer facilities and network environments.

• 1.

  Personal Competence: Physical abilities for seeing, hearing and manipulating, linguistic literacy, computer skill and cultural background.

• 2.

  Computer Facility: Processing power, resolution, colour quality, sound quality and battery life.

• 3.

  Network Environment: Bandwidth availability, specification and transfer mode.

Therefore, multimedia information should be transmitted by switching user interface, media and QoS parameters reflecting these differences. Here, we present a new approach to UMA to support elderly and handicap people in order to use their devices and network environments in full performances based on such concept as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

UMA

The UMA provides three kinds of switching functions: User Interface Switching (UIS), Media Switching (MS) and QoS Switching (QS). In Figure 2, we show these switching functions (i.e., SF1-SF3):

Figure 2.

Switching functions

• SF1: UIS: Switch to user interfaces (UI) appropriate for users’ competences and display devices.

• SF2: MS: Switch to media appropriate for users’ competences, performances of terminal devices and networks.

• SF3: QS: Control media qualities appropriate for users’ competences and terminal devices.

These functions are applied in the ascending order (from SF1 to SF3) at the beginning to play multimedia information or in the descending order during playing.