Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Nicholas Wrem

Hubert Van Hoof

David Gray

Jason Anthony Grieves

David John Brennan

Paul James Reid

Douglas R Kirschner

Amish Patel

Brent Gilbert

Brett Humphrey

Igor V Grebnev

Niranjan Shivanand Baligar

Andres E Espinoza-Masias

David Michael Gray

Systems and methods for generating and broadcasting a dynamic identifier are presented. Based on the current context and rules established for accessing personal information, a dynamic identifier corresponding to a computer user is dynamically generated and provided to a computing device corresponding to the computer user. The computing device may broadcast the dynamic identifier to others. Upon receipt of a dynamic identifier, a party wishing to determine information regarding the broadcasting party must query an information service with the dynamic identifier. According to a set of rules and/or permissions established for the target computer user (broadcasting the dynamic identifier), accessible information is identified and returned to the requesting party. Additionally, a user is provided with the ability to edit, add to, and/or delete information that is stored by the identification service regarding the user on behalf of a submitting party.

User-management of third-party user information

A screen reader for a computing device with a touch sensitive user interface. The screen reader operates in an investigatory mode in which touch inputs detected through the user interface are interpreted as inputs designating content on the display to verbally render. Each selection may be interpreted as designating a unit of content at the designated location. The size of the unit may be determined based on a direction of motion of pointing device arriving at the location on the display where the unit of content is designated. In this way, a user may, through simple and intuitively learned commands, designate content in units of different sizes such as characters, words, lines or paragraphs, when the content is text, and/or individual user interface elements when the displayed content being selected includes graphical elements.

Assistive reading interface

Broadcasts from beacon devices each of which is disposed in a known different physical location within a venue are controlled. Scheduling information for events scheduled to take place at the venue may be collected from calendar management sources and analyzed. Notification of an emergent event associated with the venue or its geographic location may also be received from emergent event notification sources and analyzed. The result of these analyses and the knowledge of the physical location of each of the beacon devices are used to generate a set of broadcast rules for each of the beacon devices, where these rules specify one or more beacon signals to be periodically broadcast by the beacon device and the timing by which these signals are to be broadcast. For each of the beacon devices, the set of broadcast rules for the beacon device is downloaded to the beacon device.

Event-triggered control of beacon broadcasts

The described technology provides a system and method for dynamically managing a listen list for beacon aware devices. A mobile device may be configured to listen for one or more beacon UUIDs based on a listen list. A contextual change detected by the mobile device may trigger a collection of additional contextual information and update to the listen list based on the additional contextual information. Using the described technology, the mobile device may use a limited set of beacon UUIDs to improve micro-location granularity and enhance the mobile device's resources.

Dynamically managing a listen list of beacon aware devices

Assistive buffer usage techniques are described. In one or more implementations, audio generated through text-to-speech conversion is output, the audio corresponding to text portioned in one of a plurality of buffers from an item of content. An input is received to rewind or fast forward the output of the audio. Responsive to the input, additional audio is output that was generated through text-to-speech conversion from text portioned in another one of the plurality of buffers.

Assistive buffer usage techniques

A commanding interface can provide an efficient computer interface for users of assistive technology by focusing on the tasks that an application can perform, rather than on the interface the application exposes. The commanding interface can provide a search mechanism that searches for and presents functions or functionality in response and dynamically updates results as the search query is entered. Additionally, the commanding interface can prioritize search results based on contextual data, including prior search terms, prior actions, and the context of the user's interaction with the application program. The commanding interface can enable the user to filter the functions and functionality presented through the commanding interface according to types of user-performed activities for which such functions would be utilized, patterns, or heuristically determined associations.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Nicholas Wrem