GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-93-11
Title:
Automatic Generation of Context-Sensitive Textual Help
Authors:
Johannes J. deGraaff
Piyawadee "Noi" Sukaviriya
Charles A.P.G. van der Mast
Abstract:
Graphical user interfaces tend to get more and more complex, and
consequently, the user needs help to work with these interfaces.
Development of good help systems is very time-consuming, if only because
the help system needs to change whenever the specifications do.
Therefore, we have been concentrating on the automatic generation of
help.
The context of the research reported in this paper is the User
Interface Design Evvironment (UIDE), which uses high-level application
and interface representations to generate interfaces and help. Based on
descriptions of an interface, help can be generated to answer two
questions: "Why is an object not usable (grayed out)?", and "How can it
be made usable?". Pre- and post-conditions, part of the semantics and
sequencing control representations in UIDE, are used to answer these
questions.
The help system uses unsatisfied preconditions to explain why an
object in the interface is disabled. A standard set of templates is used
to translate often occurring predicates into text. A planner is used to
derive how to enable the object in question. The help system looks at
those predicates that must become true to enable the object, and searches
for objects with corresponding post-conditions.
Keywords:
Context-sensitive help, automatic help, textual help, UIDE, user
interface representations
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