Providing Assistive Technology Applications as a Service Through Cloud Computing

Users with disabilities interact with Personal Computers (PCs) using Assistive Technology (AT) software solu. Such applications run on a PC that a person with a disability commonly uses. However the configuration of AT applications is not trivial at all, especially whenever the user needs to work on a PC that does not allow him/her to rely on his/her AT tools (e.g., at work, at university, in an Internet point). In this paper, we discuss how cloud computing provides a valid technological solution to enhance such a scenario. With the emergence of cloud computing, many applications are executed on top of virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization allows us to achieve a software implementation of a real computer able to execute a standard operating system and any kind of application. In this paper we propose to build personalized VMs running AT programs and settings. By using the remote desktop technology, our solution enables users to control their customized virtual desktop environment by means of an HTML5-based web interface running on any computer equipped with a browser, whenever they are. To achieve such a goal, we propose a system based on the CLEVER middleware to manage VMs and on the Guacamole HTML-5 remote desktop gateway with the VNC technology to access remote virtual desktops. In the end, we present several experiments by considering different network scenarios.