GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-93-39
Title:
Automatic Generation of Context-Sensitive Textual Help
Authors:
Johannes J. de Graaff
Piyawadee "Noi" Sukaviriya
Charles 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 Environment (UIDE)[1], which uses high-level
application and interface representation 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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