For over twenty years the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has managed and developed a set of encoding guidelines for the representation of humanities, social sciences, and linguistics -- to preserve and share -- texts in digital form. Using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its backbone, TEI is the generally accepted encoding model for the digital humanities. Due to XML’s extensible nature, it can often be difficult to share these files and even more problematic to make them interoperable. The goal of our project is to build a prototype Application Programming Interface (API) for TEI-XML documents that provides greater interoperability while at the same time being easy to use by an audience with backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and linguistics. Currently, we have produced a deliverable with two components. The first: an API that, once installed, can return multiple views of a TEI-XML file using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as its query method. The second is a set of user-tested support documentation that is both easily discoverable and easliy usable by our target audience. In future iterations of our prototype we plan to include a more robust listing of return view types, the ability to support multiple TEI-XML files, and API key permissions support.

Research has shown that online mindfulness training is an effective means to reduce stress and increase coping among university students. The beGreatful project builds on the findings of this research to create an online platform which students can use to participate in mindful practices. The platform operates around two key components. The first component is an online gratitude journal. This component is designed to encourage mindful thinking by guiding the user through the process of completing a journal entry. Our goal within this component is to help students build the habit of setting aside time to reflect upon their day. This helps foster the habit of positive thinking which can lead to increased resilience. The second component is an analytical feature designed to help users visualize patterns that occur in their journal entries so that they can become more aware of their thought patterns. This feature also reinforces the habit of writing in the journal daily by providing a snapshot of each day and showing the user’s improvement overtime. The online platform will serve as a low cost, accessible tool for college students to maintain a healthy mindset. We are currently in the design phase of the project. We have surveyed approximately 50 students at the University of Washington to gauge initial student interest in the project and have tested our first iteration of prototypes with 10 students. Based on these tests, we are working on our second iteration of prototypes which we will continue to test and improve. We will begin developing the platform next quarter and will have built the first live version of the beGreatful web application by the end of spring quarter.

Blind programmers bring a unique perspective to the computer developer workplace, and make important contributions to the computer science field. However, blind programmers often cannot use computer development environments because they are inaccessible, and usage can be slow and tedious for blind developers who use screen readers. The goal of our research is to design and build plug-ins for various coding environments to make it easier for blind developers to code. In prior work, Ms. Baker made a plug-in called StructJumper for Eclipse, a Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The plug-in creates a navigable hieratical tree based on the nesting structure of a Java class, essentially creating an outline of key points (such as method headings and control flow statements) in the code structure. Blind programmers can switch between StructJumper’s TreeView and default Text Editor to navigate code with greater ease. The usability of StructJumper was tested by seven blind programmers, whose results showed a trend of completing tasks faster with the plug-in then without. This suggests that StructJumper is a viable plug-in to improve accessibility to blind developers. However Java is not the only major programming language developers’ use on a daily basis. Thus we are pursuing further research to extend StructJumper beyond Java and implement plug-ins/add-ons for other commonly used programming languages and development environments, such as for the programming language Python. My work is the start of coding StructJumper as a plug-in for Visual Studio (practically the only screen reader compatible Python IDE). This plug-in is written in Visual Studio using C#, .NET framework, and IronPython to parse Python files open in the IDE.