User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and it is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services' consumption on TV sets is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited human computer interaction (HCI) and (ii) lack of consideration of users' real life context in the digital television(dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set's large user base is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society, especially the most vulnerable ones. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user's real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for dierent use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results.