Modality Abstraction: Capturing Logical Interaction Design as Abstraction from "User Interfaces for All"

Modality abstraction is a concept for capturing those parts of a user interface that describe logical interaction in abstraction from appearance. Thus, modality abstraction provides a common ground for user interfaces that may differ in used representational media, input modalities and dialogue styles. Building modality abstraction into interactive software contributes to portability, modifiability and integration of different modalities. To facilitate modality abstraction, we have developed the MAUI toolkit with building blocks for Modality Abstracting User Interfaces and the MEMFIS method for building modality abstraction into interactive software.