Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla

Kowndinya Boyalakuntla, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

The vision of providing access to all web content equally for all users makes web accessibility a fundamental goal of today's internet. Web accessibility is the practice of removing barriers from websites that could hinder functionality for users with various disabilities. Web accessibility is measured against the accessibility guidelines such as WCAG, GIGW, and so on. WCAG 2.2 is the latest set of guidelines for web accessibility that helps in making websites accessible. The web accessibility tools available in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), only conform up to WCAG 2.1 guidelines, while no tools exist for the latest set of guidelines. Despite the availability of several tools to check the conformity of websites with WCAG 2.1 guidelines, there is a scarcity of tools that are both open source and scalable. To support automated accessibility evaluation of numerous websites against WCAG 2.2, 2.1, and 2.0 we present a tool, WAccess. WAccess highlights violations of 13 guidelines from WCAG 2.0, 9 guidelines from WCAG 2.1, and 7 guidelines from WCAG 2.2 of a specific web page on the web console and suggests the fix for violations while specifying violating code snippet simultaneously. We evaluated WAccess against 2227 government websites of India and observed a total of about 6.1 million violations.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Kowndinya Boyalakunta, Sridhar Chimalakonda

GitHub hosts millions of software repositories, facilitating developers to contribute to many projects in multiple ways. Most of the information about the repositories is text-based in the form of stars, forks, commits, and so on. However, developers willing to contribute to projects on GitHub often find it challenging to select appropriate projects to contribute to or reuse due to the large number of repositories present on GitHub. Further, obtaining this required information often becomes a tedious process, as one has to carefully mine information hidden inside the repository. To alleviate the effort intensive mining procedures, researchers have proposed npm-badges to outline information relating to build status of a project. However, these badges are static and limit their usage to package dependency and build details. Adding visual cues such as badges to the repositories might reduce the search space for developers. Hence, we present GitQ, to automatically augment GitHub repositories with badges representing information about source code and project maintenance. Presenting GitQ as a browser plugin to GitHub could make it easily accessible to developers using GitHub. GitQ is evaluated with 15 developers based on the UTAUT model to understand developer perception towards its usefulness. We observed that 11 out of 15 developers perceived GitQ to be useful in identifying the right set of repositories using visual cues such as generated by GitQ. The source code and tool are available for download on GitHub at https://github.com/gitq-for-github/plugin, and the demo can be found at https://youtu.be/c0yohmIat3A.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of the projects involve frequent updates and extensive reuses. A well-updated documentation helps in a better understanding of the software project and also facilitates efficient contribution and reuse. Though software documentation plays an important role in the development and maintenance of software, it also suffers from various issues that include insufficiency, inconsistency, ill-maintainability, and so on. Exploring the perception of developers towards documentation could help in understanding the reasons behind prevalent issues in software documentation. It could further aid in deciding on training that could be given to the developer community towards building more sustainable projects for society. Analyzing sentiments of contributors to a project could provide insights on understanding developer perceptions. Hence, as the first step towards this direction, we analyze sentiments of commit messages specific to the documentation of a software project. To this end, we considered the commit history of 998 GitHub projects from the GHTorrent dataset and identified 10,996 commits that correspond to the documentation of repositories. Further, we apply sentiment analysis techniques to obtain insights on the type of sentiment being expressed in commit messages of the selected commits. We observe that around 45% of the identified commit messages express trust emotion.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

With the increase in acceptance of open source platforms for knowledge sharing, Question and Answer (Q\&A) websites such as Stack Overflow have become increasingly popular in the programming domain. Many novice programmers visit Stack Overflow for reasons that include posing questions, finding answers for issues they come across in the process of programming. Practitioners voluntarily answer questions on Stack Overflow based on their experience or prior knowledge. Most of these answers are also accompanied by comments from users of Stack Overflow. Questions, answers and comments on Stack Overflow also include sentiments of users, which when analysed and presented could motivate users in reading and contributing to the posts. However, the sentiment of these posts is not being depicted in the current Stack Overflow platform. There is extensive research on analysing sentiments on social networking platforms such as twitter. Representing sentiment of a post might motivate users to follow or answer certain posts. While there exist several tools that augment or annotate Stack Overflow platform for developers, we are not aware of tools that deal with sentiment of the posts. In this paper, we propose StackEmo as a Google Chrome plugin to augment comments on Stack Overflow with emojis, based on the sentiment of the comments posted, with the aim to provide users with visual cues that could motivate the users to review and contribute to available comments. We evaluated StackEmo through an in-user likert scale based survey with 30 university students. The results of the survey provided us insights on improving StackEmo, with 83% participants having recommended the plugin to their peers.

Dheeraj Vagavolu, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

Despite the growth of online museums for India's cultural heritage data, there is limited increase in terms of visitors. Over the years, online museums adopted many techniques to improve the overall user experience. However, many Indian online museums display artifacts as lists and grids with basic search functionality, making it less visually appealing and difficult to comprehend. Our work aims to enhance the user experience of accessing Indian online museums by utilizing advancements in information visualization. Hence, we propose MuseumViz, a framework which processes data from online museums and visualizes it using four different interactive visualizations: the Network Graph, TreepMap, Polygon Chart and SunBurst Chart. We demonstrate MuseumViz on a total of 723 cultural heritage artifacts present in the Archaeological Survey of India, Goa. Based on our evaluation with 25 users, about 83% of them find it easier and more comprehensible to browse cultural heritage artifacts through MuseumViz.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Dheeraj Vagavolu, Sridhar Chimalakonda

Covid-19 has been affecting population across the world for more than an year, with diverse strains of this virus being identified in many countries. Vaccines to help in curbing the virus are being developed and administered. Preventing the spread of the disease requires collaborative efforts from everyone. People with varied professional backgrounds have varied responsibilities in controlling the pandemic. It is important that everyone is aware of their respective responsibilities and also empathize with efforts and duties of other individuals. It is here, we wish to leverage the potential of games in healthcare domain, towards educating about Covid-19. With an aim to educate the population about vaccination against Covid-19, responsibilities of citizens with varied professional backgrounds, and emphasize on the need for collaboration to fight against the pandemic, by following safety measures, we present SurviveCovid-19++, a collaborative multiplayer desktop based game. The game essentially revolves around four roles - doctor, sanitation worker, citizen and law enforcer, delivering their duties, following safety measures and collaboratively clearing multiple stages in the game. We have performed a preliminary evaluation of the game through a qualitative and quantitative user survey. The results of the user survey were encouraging, with volunteers expressing their increased empathy towards efforts of individuals with varied professional backgrounds, and better understanding of the importance of safety measures against Covid-19.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a repository is diversified, among various files, with most of it present in ReadMe files. However, other software artifacts in the repository, such as issue reports and pull requests could also contribute to documentation, without documentation being explicitly specified. Hence, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy of documentation sources by analyzing different software artifacts, developer interviews and card-sorting approach. We inspected multiple artifacts of 950 public GitHub repositories, written in four different programming languages, C++, C#, Python and Java, and analyzed the type and amount of documentation that could be extracted from these artifacts. To this end, we observe that, about 25.93% of information extracted from all sources proposed in the taxonomy contains error-related documentation, and that pull requests contribute to around 18.21% of extracted information.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda

Emails are one of the most frequently used medium of communication in the present day across multiple domains including industry and educational institutions. Understanding sentiments being expressed in an email could have a considerable impact on the recipients' action or response to the email. However, it is difficult to interpret emotions of the sender from pure text in which emotions are not explicitly present. Researchers have tried to predict customer attrition by integrating emails in client-company environment with emotions. However, most of the existing works deal with static assessment of email emotions. Presenting sentiments of emails dynamically to the reader could help in understanding senders' emotion and as well have an impact on readers' action. Hence, in this paper, we present EmoG as a Google Chrome Extension which is intended to support university students. It augments emails with emojis based on the sentiment being conveyed in the email, which might also offer faster overview of email sentiments and act as tags that could help in automatic sorting and processing of emails. Currently, EmoG has been developed to support Gmail inbox on a Google Chrome browser, and could be extended to other inboxes and browsers with ease. We have conducted a user survey with 15 university students to understand the usefulness of EmoG and received positive feedback.

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Dheeraj Vagavolu, Sridhar Chimalakonda

Covid-19 has been causing severe loss to the human race. Considering the mode of spread and severity, it is essential to make it a habit to follow various safety precautions such as using sanitizers and masks and maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Individuals are widely educated about the safety measures against the disease through various modes such as announcements through online or physical awareness campaigns, advertisements in the media and so on. The younger generations today spend considerably more time on mobile phones and games. However, there are very few applications or games aimed to help in practicing safety measures against a pandemic, which is much lesser in the case of Covid-19. Hence, we propose a 2D survival-based game, SurviveCovid-19, aimed to educate people about safety precautions to be taken for Covid-19 outside their homes by incorporating social distancing and usage of masks and sanitizers in the game. SurviveCovid-19 has been designed as an Android-based mobile game, along with a desktop (browser) version, and has been evaluated through a remote quantitative user survey, with 30 volunteers using the questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model. The survey results are promising, with all the survey questions having a mean value greater than 3.5. The game's quality factor was 69.3, indicating that the game could be classified as excellent quality, according to the MEEGA+ model.