Multichat: persistent, text-as-you-type messaging in a web browser for fluid multi-person interaction and collaboration. Jonathan Schull1, Mike Axelrod, Larry Quinsland Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY 14607 585-738-6696
[email protected]
Abstract To facilitate face to face conversation between deaf and hearing participants, we created a cross-platform, browserbased, persistent text-as-you-type system that aggregates each individual's utterances in revisable personal notes on a userconfigurable multi-person workspace in a common web browser. The system increases the fluidity of real time interaction, makes it easier to keep track of an individual's contributions over time, and allows users to format their contributions and customize their displays. Because the system affords "full duplex" parallel communication in a web browser, it supports new patterns of interaction and new possibilities for dynamic browser-based visual representations of temporal patterns of communication. Furthermore, the near-real-time-architectures we are exploring seem to open the way to a family of centralized and peer-to-peer persistent conversation applications such as realtime wikis, collaborative web design systems, collaborative websurfing applications, and an in-class discussion systems.
1. Introduction There is a natural synergy between the study of populations with special communication needs and the study of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) [22]. While developing a chat application for face to face conversation in mixed deaf-hearing groups, we have developed an application and a platform that is of potentially general use: not just for face to face chat, but for chat in general, phone and video conferencing, and collaborative web design. Along the way we have come to feel strongly about three points of view that will guide the discussion. First, our work on collaboration in deaf and hearing groups leads us to argue that turn taking is a reluctant accommodation to channel-contingent constraints in speech and sign “systems.” CMC systems can circumvent 1
these constraints and make turn-taking more of a transient ad hoc option than a structural or communicational necessity. Second, we question the literature’s focus on turns and turn-taking of utterances as the essence of conversational interaction; we will suggest, instead that conversation is more like a collaborative dance in which participants influence each other, continuously and in parallel, actively and passively. CMC systems should aspire to this kind of dynamic, rather than to an idealized dynamic of “coherent” turn-enforced conversation. Third, we suggest that, on the web at least, it may be useful to blur the distinction between persistent conversation and real time collaboration. Web technologies have matured to the point where they can accommodate a larger region of the CMC design space than has generally been assumed. Because browser-based near-real time multimedia interaction is now a viable option, because client side customization is an increasingly powerful aspect of modern browsers, and because the web page itself can now be collaboratively edited and re-distributed in near-real time, the web is changing from a relatively unidirectional document-based medium to a protean multi-way medium in which document sub-elements can be created and modified by many people at once. In this vision, the web page, and the web itself, can be seen as persistent real time conversations.
2. As we may converse: sign, speech, and text Face to face conversation is often treated as the “goldstandard” for real time interpersonal communication, and the literature tends to view turns and turn taking as
We wish to acknowledge the contributions of our students Qing Quan and Brian Ijeoma, and the suipport from an RIT Provost Learning and Innovation Grant.
fundamental units of “ideal” “coherent” conversation [9]. This is understandable, given that turn-negotiation is an obvious and sometimes contentious conversational task, given that parallel overlapping speech is genuinely difficult for listeners to track, and given that written transcriptions of conversations typically impose a presumed linear order on the proceedings. [12] However, an alternative (and not incompatible) view acknowledges cultural, gender, and situational variations in face to face conversation and recognizes forms of face to face conversation in which simultaneous overlapping speech can produce collaborative experiences, artifacts and higher-order communicational units with their own internal coherence [2, 5, 6, 18, 19, 20 ,21]. Our work on face to face collaboration in small groups of deaf and hearing students lead us to think of the “ideal” conversation as a continuous multi-way stream of overlapping backchannel and paralinguistic collaboration incorporating evanescent communications such as spoken words and transient gestures, persistent communications such as held signs and postures, and persistent artifacts such as spatial arrangements and documents. If we consider this the ideal, we can perhaps better represent conversation as it often is, and as it may be engineered--as a collaborative dance rather than a series of alternating utterances.
2.1 Background Because Rochester Institute of Technology is home to the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, deaf and hearing students often find themselves working in small project-oriented groups. In addition, numerous faculty, students and support staff including interpreters are fluent in both sign and speech, and often mix modes of communication to adapt to various situations. The campus thus provides a natural laboratory for studying communication and conversation patterns under the constraints and affordances of numerous situations and communication options.
2.2. Affordances and constraints of sign vs speech Sign language affords more spatial and temporal overlap than speech, and can therefore excel when background noise, internal physiology, social context, or spatial positioning make speech difficult or inappropriate [c.f., 12]. For example, in classrooms and auditoriums before lectures at RIT, one often sees deaf and hearing signers engaged in concurrent dyadic conversations that criss-cross over distances where speech would be nonfunctional and impolite. Moreover, the “visual input, manual output” architecture of the sign channel allows signers to both “send” and “receive” sign at the same time.
Perhaps for this reason, deaf dyadic conversation often seems (to me, a non-signer) to involve more continuous simultaneous and overlapping signing among interlocutors than spoken dyadic conversations. [c.f. 2, 19]. But while sign can thus have advantages over speech in dyadic conversation, it is not particularly well-suited to group conversations. Because sign is visually perceived and spatially located, signers who want to be comprehended must make sure they are visually apprehended. [2, 10, 19] If one’s interlocutor is looking away, one’s signs may not be perceived. (In contrast a speaker among listeners can expect to be heard even when her utterances come from an unexpected and unattended quarter; listeners can shift attention to a new speaker’s voice and may even be able to retrieve recently-past utterances from auditory memory.) Simultaneous perception of multiple signers is thus possible only if the signers are all within the perceiver’s field of view, and even then it is difficult. Turn-taking behaviors therefore play a significant role in sign. Before signing, signers will often “seek the floor” by waving their hands, tapping the table, or tapping other group members’ shoulders. Signers in groups will also recruit others to help in gain focus, analogous to the clanking of wine glasses when a dinner speaker is preparing to propose a toast. In some committee meetings at NTID, turn taking is formalized by passing around a “talking stick” or other object so that he who holds the talking stick holds the floor. While turn negotiation thus seems more robust in deaf groups, Coates et al [2] also demonstrate that deaf “collaborative floor” “all in together” conversations take place in both deaf and hearing groups of friends. Such observations suggest that turn-taking and conversational overlap in homogeneous deaf and hearing groups are adaptations to physical and social constraints on the communication channel. And even in deaf groups, where turn taking is even more important, the “ideal” of well-regulated non-overlapping sign is often honored in the breach by an ongoing dance of overlapping communication.
2.3. Mixed group communication. These issues become particularly salient when signing and non-signing individuals must communicate in mixed groups. At RIT, two coping strategies are common: interpreters, and computer mediated conversation. 2.3.1 Interpreter Mediated Mixed Group Communication. At RIT, interpreters are available in most scheduled classes with deaf enrollment. Their job is to translate speech to sign, and sign to speech. If turn taking were the rule, this would be relatively easy. But in fact the interpreter’s job is nearly impossible. There is a literature
on this very subject: in a Flemish study of interpretation and turn taking in all-sign vs. mixed committee meetings [10], the author points out that “equality of deaf and hearing participants [in mixed meetings] will be achieved” only if the chairperson allows only one person to speak at a time. “If the chairperson does not follow this practice...then the interpreter’s task should be to step out of his or her neutral role and…. resolve the problem, becoming a manager of “the intercultural event of interpreting.” As a hearing participant in such situations I can also testify that an interpreters requests that speakers “speak one at a time” often fall on deaf ears, not because hearing speakers are hostile to the requests, but because functional speech habits die hard, especially in the heat of conversation. One might conclude that CMC systems should strive to make it easier to enforce turn-taking. But a grander goal for CMC might be to eliminate the need for turn-taking. Because reading is faster than typing, multiple participants in CMC could potentially type and read in parallel. And while psychological factors may well limit the number of parallel written conversation streams that can be tracked in real time, today’s IMing teenage multi-taskers contemporary suggest that those limitations may be more malleable than may have been assumed [7, 8]. Overlapping speech is only one of the challenges confronting deaf students and their interpreters in mixed group meetings. Interpretation produces time lag and semantic degradation (or at least transmogrification; some skilled interpreters actually add clarity as they translate). And because deaf students must focus visual attention on the interpreter, they are often blinded to many of the sights (and all of the sounds) of group social interaction. Denied access to much of the conversational dance, it is harder to understand what is going on or to make timely and onpoint contributions. Finally, yet another challenge arises when shared documents compete for visual attention in group meetings. The Flemish study [10] implies that turn-taking rules should be applied to documents no less than to people: When papers were distributed in the all-sign meeting, time was given for people to look at them. Afterwards, the person distributing the papers explained what was written down, showed the relevant passage to the whole group so everybody knew the passage about which he or she was talking, and then discussed it. When papers were distributed in the mixed meetings, no time was given to look at them. The hearing participants listened to the explanations and looked at the papers at the same time, whereas Deaf participants needed to first read the papers and then look at the explanations, but were unable to follow this process without missing important information. Moreover, relevant passages were not shown to the Deaf participants. [12]
To summarize, parallel overlapping multi-way conversation that includes interaction with documents is common in both deaf and hearing groups, when available affordances and social norms permit. When such affordances and norms are lacking, turn-taking and other attention-structuring rules become particularly important. When deaf and hearing individuals converse in combined groups, conversational strategies often conflict and fail, despite interpreters’ Herculean efforts. 2.3.2 Computer Mediated Mixed Group Communication An obvious aspiration for CMC design is to disintermediate communication between deaf and hearing students and reduce the need for interpreters. Mixed student groups at RIT routinely use standard chat systems such as AOL’s instant messenger, or FirstClass’s built in chat client. But here too the shortcomings of standard chat systems and the designed environment are also made painfully clear. Let us consider the designed environment first. While RIT’s students have access to literally hundreds of computers in dozens of generally accessible rooms, virtually nowhere is the furniture arranged to support face to face computer-mediated interaction. Because computers are arranged side by side, chat is actually elbow to elbow rather than face to face. (A shame, since faces beat elbows hands down.) When I have used laptops in face to face computermediated conversations with a deaf student, the artificiality and shortcomings of normal chat interaction became painfully clear. Most chat systems follow a “typeand-then-send” model of communication in which messages are transmitted and received after they are composed, rather than as they are typed. The resulting semantic lag is particularly unsettling in face to face interaction: your interlocutor must simply wait to find out what you have been typing; and even though I am a touch typist, I tend to look at the screen in this situation. I do look up when I finish typing, but then my interlocutor is typically looking at her screen and reading. (So here is a situation in which turn taking is enforced to the detriment of comfortable or efficient social dynamic interaction.) “Type-and-then-send chat” poses further challenges when more than two participants are involved. Conversation becomes genuinely incoherent, with multiple parallel conversations interleaving in a spuriously linear transcript, and with the words of the more verbose writers scrolling other recent utterances up off the screen [9]. This “dominance of the verbose” problem is commonly observed in Internet Relay Chat groups. There are, of course, chat commercial systems that communicate text-as-you-type, such as unix’s talk and ytalk¸ and Apple’s iChat under Rendezvous. These allow interlocutors to simultaneously transmit and receive typed characters in small increments of just a few characters
without having to click a Send button. They provide a palpably tighter sense of coordination and communication, and make face to face interaction less awkward. Typed backchannel communications, counterpoints, and even the undoing of nascent comments all become visible indications of your interlocutor’s state while you are typing, and provide semantic accompaniments to facial expressions, and other gestures. These systems thus allow simultaneous overlapping communication. But in iChattextual contributions are still embedded in a transcript of linearly ordered blocks defined by clicks of the Send button, and while the linear transcript cleverly creates the visual illusion of orderly turn taking, this actually misrepresents the flow of the conversation. In UNIX’s talk and ytalk, there is no way to determine the temporal relationship between various utterances, once they have been typed. Rosenberger et al’s Fugue system explicitly attempted to support and visualize conversational overlap and turnnegotiation by having parallel conversation streams advance from left to right in real time, along with a musicnotation like visualization of conversational tempo and rhythm [xx]. One virtue of this approach is that it does not produce illusory conversational sequences when none actually occur. However, the span of conversation visible on screen at any time was quite narrow. We set out to explore approaches that would make it easier to track long-term conversational content, especially in mixed deaf/hearing face-to-face situations.
3. Towards a multi-person chat system to facilitate face-to-face communication.
The prototype envisioned a combination of text-as-youtype chat, images and streaming media (in the form of the red-shirted text-to-sign-translating avatar based upon Michigan University’s American Sign Language Browser [4], along with two different persistent transcripting methods. On the right the students sought to replicate the iChat-under-rendezvous linear transcript in which entries are ordered by time of initiation. On the left, each individual’s separate contribution would be aggregated into a single personalized window; this feature would address the “dominance of the verbose” problem inherent in linearly ordered chats. A less elaborate user interface idea is shown in Figure 2. Here, the verbose are allowed dominating the persistent linear transcript, but all participating parties have parity in the lower window where text streams left to right as in Fugue.
Figure 2.
A third sketch of a real-time text-as-you type persistent transcripting system is depicted in Figure 3. This one would abandon the fiction of a sequentially ordered transcript in order to intuitively depict parallelism, temporal overlap, and timing.
3.1 Design Ideas These challenges and opportunities were discussed and explored in my classes on Interface design. One project group comprised of 3 deaf and two hearing students developed the non-functional prototype depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 3. While none of these visions addressed the shared document problem, they all seemed (and still seem) like viable candidate interfaces, and each might have advantages over the other in specific circumstances. It struck us that a functional rapid prototyping platform would be very useful in exploring the large design space that was unfolding before us, and that if we could make a
powerful malleable and user-friendly system available to our users, they might themselves develop interfaces and styles of interaction that suited their tastes and needs.
3.2 Design Goals Given the challenges and opportunities reviewed above, we wanted a platform that would • disintermediate communication between hearing and deaf students. • Support face-to-face, nonverbal and paralinguistic communication • support synchronous persistent multi-person text-asyou-type chat • support but not require turn taking • Intuitively visualize parallel and overlapping, as well as sequential “no-gap, no-overlap” conversations • require minimal special hardware and software • require minimal configuration • support maximal customization These goals were encapsulated in a design scenario in which a deaf student brings a wireless laptop or handheld Personal Computer (PC) to a friend or professor’s dorm room or office. We assumed the student’s interlocutor does not sign, but does have a computer. If the computer does have network access, the deaf student points his own PC’s web browser to a web page that contains our chat solution, shows the screen to his interlocutor and invites him to load the URL in his own browser. The page in question is a shared workspace, and modifications made by one person are seen by the other with a delay of not more than one second. If the interlocutor’s computer does not have network access, our deaf protagonist offers him a USB thumb drive that contains a wireless access device, and an internet shortcut that points to a web page served by a web server located on the deaf students own PC. As the scenario illustrates, we felt that a web browser (with javascript) was a viable cross-platform “least common denominator” and that user interface elements made available by modern web browsers browser could potentially put adequate power and easy-enough customizability into the hands of HTML-savvy users. Having our deaf student run his own portable web server is considered a step toward our ultimate vision of a server extension embedded in the browser itself. We were less confident that a web browser and a userinstallable web server could subserve the kind of near-real time many-to-many communications we envisioned. Therefore much of our subsequent and ongoing work on this project has been devoted to the exploration and development of a suitable web-based architecture. Indeed, although we will present some preliminary usability testing results with deaf and hearing students in
this paper, the project is a work in progress and we have not yet satisfied our design goals. In the next section, we will describe our experiments and development of a prototype that has been fairly wellreceived by deaf and hearing students, and explain why we are now fairly confident that today’s mozilla/firefox-based systems can in fact support an architectural vision of a peer to peer multi-way web system with implications that go beyond our initial goals for the mediation of deaf and hearing interaction.
3.3 Platforms and Prototypes 3.3.1. A table-based functional prototype. Although combining and compositing images and data as envisioned in Figure 1 is relatively commonplace on the web, it was not clear that elements of a web page could be updated and distributed to multiple users with adequate responsiveness and without requiring distracting redraws of the that the whole pages. However, in the Spring of 2004 (6 months before similar technology was popularized by Google Suggest and Google Maps) we were able to produce a functional prototype that let users type into the cells of HTML-coded table and have their inputs and those of other individuals viewing the same URL appear in nearEven though every real time with minimal flicker.2. keystroke by every user initiated an exchange with a web server running on one participant’s computer (delivering the current contents of a just-modified cell, receiving the contents of all other just-modified cells, updating the renderings of those cells, and adjusting column widths dynamically to give more space to cells with more content), flicker was minimal and responsiveness was adequate with up to 3 participants. 3.3.2 Multichat, a functional prototype based on Webnote. Encouraged by this proof of concept, we sought a user interface that would allow us to rapidly develop, test, and implement alternative user interfaces (such as those illustrated in Figures 1 and 2) for real time chat and collaboration in a web browser. An open source wiki developed by Tony Chang at http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/ was a convenient foundation. Webnote allows users to create, edit, resize, reposition, and recolor “sticky notes” on a web page. HTML tags, and even functional JavaScript can all be typed directly into a sticky note, and when a user clicks the Save button, the content of all notes on that page are 2 Incidentally, the polling method we used was not XMLHTTP (or AJAX as it is now called), but rather a javascript technique (see http://www.unn.ac.uk/~isrd1/students/snippits/client.html) that uses a command like src=divname.js?div5=look%20Mom%20NoHands to transfer data to the server and retrieve a new script from the server every N seconds. The script, generated by the server on the fly and executed in the browser, contained javascript commands for modifying named divs in the document.
sent to the server, where it is stored and made accessible to anyone who accesses the URL in question. Being a wiki, the server also creates new pages on the fly whenever it receives a request for a novel URL. Webnote’s look, feel, and modifiability was attractive to us for prototyping purposes and because it gave us and our users freedom to experiment and tinker with their own page layouts. However, Webnote was not designed for concurrent use by multiple individuals: the unit of updating is still the whole document, such that the content of all notes on that page are overwritten, even if they are being concurrently edited by other users. Furthermore the entire page must be reloaded in order to see the changes others have made. We therefore sought to add automatic note-wise nearreal-time updating to the Webnote system, so that multiple individuals could edit different notes on the same page concurrently and see each other’s changes in real time. The resulting functional prototype, dubbed “Multichat,” is illustrated in Figure 4.
allowed us to perform a fairly well counterbalanced comparison of iChat with interpreted conversation, and to collect qualitative data about Multichat as thenimplemented. The entire session was video taped, the interpreted conversations were transcribed, and the chat transcripts preserved. During the final focus group postmortem, we asked students to identify pros and cons of the three systems.
Table 1 The data are still being analyzed and the sample sizes were too small for statistical analysis, but some broad quantitative and qualitative observations are worth noting. Figure 4. 3.3.3. Preliminary Usability Results We have used the system in a variety of ad hoc situations and been impressed by its potential versatility. It is a viable system for browser-based moment-bymoment multi-person written interaction. Applied to web page design, the system makes it possible for many people to create edit and position "notes" on live but persistent web pages, and to see co-workers changes as they occur. As an adjunct to telephone conferences, the system allows participants to view and edit meeting notes, to-do-lists, diagrams and other web pages. To evaluate the system for mediating communication between deaf and hearing students, we conducted a pilot usability test with two mixed groups, each group comprised of two deaf and two hearing students. Each group was asked to discuss and enumerate situations on campus in which deaf and hearing students need to interact, and the issues that arise. As summarized in Table 1, the discussion proceeded in three 20-minute installments, each installment using a different communication system (Interpreted with a highly-skilled interpreter, iChat under rendezvous, and Multichat), and each followed by a written questionnaire. Our design
Figure 5 As shown in Figure 5, for both hearing and deaf students, there were three to four times as many discrete utterances (turns taken) under iChat as compared to when discussion was mediated by an interpreter. Based on our own observations and comments by three students during the post-mortem discussions, we attribute this to the fact that iChat permits parallel and tightly interleaved turn taking whereas the interpreter must single-task in her signing, and variously moderates, regulates, and facilitates the conversation. Figure 5 also indicates that chat increased hearing students’ word counts but decreased
deaf students’ word count. However, one should be aware that when a deaf person signs in an interpreted conversation we actually count the interpreter’s spoken translation; when a hearing student speaks, we count the student’s own words (not the interpreter’s signs). Word counts for deaf students in chat are further reduced because deaf students are typically less facile than hearing students in written English abilities. In general, while this exploratory study did not control all salient factors, both deaf and hearing students indicated that all three systems had strengths and weaknesses, and no system was clearly superior. This seemingly negative result is in fact remarkable: We had an extraordinarily adept and fluent interpreter, in whose presence deaf students’ words and utterances slightly dominated those of the hearing students. Yet deaf and hearing students commented favorably on chat’s potential for putting deaf and hearing students on a common unmediated footing. Students did observe that chat was faster-paced, more informal and more likely to go off-topic; but even the one deaf student who had demonstrable difficulty participating in the chat appreciated chat’s persistent text display, and felt that her ability to understand and be understood was comparable in all conditions. Finally, during the post-session focus group, several students remarked that interpreting allowed them to observe each other’s faces more easily because during chat they tended to keep their eyes on the screen. This was seen to be an advantage of interpreting, but it also suggests that face-to-face typed chat could be further improved with careful orientation and placement of furniture, screens, and “face-cams”. In the future, we plan to explore physical and environmental supports for face-toface interaction during chat in the future As for iChat vs. Multichat, the latter’s ability to support multiple parallel conversation streams was seen to have distinct advantages and, in its present form, significant shortcomings as a system for mediating face to face communication between deaf and hearing students. For small groups of individuals, real time text-as-you-type browser-based chat in movable notes was judged an attractive alternative to instant messaging by many users. However, when more than a few people were typing in parallel, users found it difficult to keep scanning notes for new material. Users often did avail themselves of the opportunity for parallel communication, but several people also remarked that it was hard to keep track of who was saying what. Another limitation of the then-current Multichat implementation is that performance deteriorates when approximately 20 or more people edit notes in parallel, performance deteriorates. (This is not surprising, because each user’s keystroke initiates an exchange with Webnote’s web server and a SQL server to which it connects.)
Our current efforts are therefore focusing on methods of visualizing conversational dynamics within the freeform Multichat user-interface environment, and on the development of a lightweight scalable peer-to-peer architecture. 3.3.4. A widget for visualizing and transcripting parallel inputs. We are currently planning to introduce a transcripting widget into the Multichat environment that will visualize temporal flow in an intuitive fashion, and allow but not enforce turn taking, and communication in an intuitive manner. To a first approximation, the real time rendering heuristic we seek is sketched in Figure 3, as applied to an imaginary joke sequence that would be confounded, in both real time and in retrospect, by traditional linear transcription schemes. Tom: Why did the chicken cross the road? Dick: To get to other side? Tom: Right! And what is the secret of good comedy? Dick: I don’t know. What is the secret of good Tom: Timing! Funny ;-> Figure 6 As can be seen, when conversation utterances alternate without overlap; the rendering heuristic reduces to a traditional transcript. However when parallel communication occurs, it will be seen, in real time and in retrospect, for what it is. We are currently Implementing this transcription widget and planning to conduct systematic usability tests of the system in both remote and face to face scenarios with hearing as well as deaf students.
4. A viable architecture for a Two Way Web.
In the course of this work, we have become impressed with the potential generality of a peer to peer, “near realtime” architecture which would allow this and other persistent conversation systems be rapidly prototyped, implemented and deployed on the web. We will therefore end this paper by describing the architecture we have in mind, disembedded from the assistive technology application domain which inspired it. We now see Multichat as an application that is built upon a “platform” that interestingly synthesizes merging web technologies and could blur the distinction between web page authoring and computer mediated conversation so that the web itself becomes a form of real time and persistent conversation. Web transactions are traditionally centrifugal, and document-centric: centralized web servers dispense whole
documents, edits are committed and redistributed in document-sized chunks by a single person at a time, and browsers return relatively small amounts of data. Yet Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision was of a two-way web that could be written as well as read via the browser [1]. Based on the work described above, we now have a system in which many individuals using just a browser, can edit the elements of a web page in (one individual per element, but many elements per page), while changes are automatically rendered and redistributed in keystrokesized chunks to all others who are viewing the URL in question. Since the content of these elements can include JavaScript (and, potentially, server commands that could instantly add new functionality to the system), the web page in the browser becomes a shared space for real time expression and multi-directionally collaboration. Anyone with a JavaScript-enabled web-browser can participate, even if they have no other means of editing or saving files. However, the current server architecture will not scale: if every browser viewing a globally popular page polled the server every second, a single central server would be swamped.
We are therefore moving toward a distributed architecture in which every user does some of the serving, and resources allocated to a given page would therefore scale with the number of users viewing that page [14,15]. It even appears that much of the machinery we need is already embedded the Mozilla family of browsers [23], raising the possibility that one could write a Firefox extension that might be installable with a single click. Figure 7 provides a sketch of the evolutionary path we have in mind. We do not mean to imply that we know how to do all of these things, nor that the vision is fully specified. But the main pieces of an interesting puzzle seem to be in place, and the puzzle seems well worth assembling. Indeed, once assembled, the puzzle could itself become a dynamic ongoing collaborative entity, modified and modifiable in real time by all who access it, installable and distributable via the servers and browsers of which it is comprised. And of course, it would be a very promising platform for extensible real time chat systems that would facilitate face-to-face communication between deaf and hearing collaborators.
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