October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4

Figure 9. A page as it’s rendered by a LCMS
Finally, accessibility of the whole process has been verified by involving in authoring and reviewing tasks blind
people using the screen reader JAWS, versions 5.10 and later (Freedom Scientific, 2006). The accessibility of
the process itself is both a complex and a crucial objective, which creates the basis for a true inclusion of people
with disabilities inside LO production teams.
Conclusions and future works
The need for simplicity in knowledge creation and sharing has been a basic concern in the international elearning
community. This paper presents a content creation and management process allowing authors to easily
produce accessible and portable LO by using personal productivity tools (e.g. a word processor).
The proposed system meets the seven main goals, listed in Section 1: it permits author to simply editing
contents, by starting from zero while reusing existing materials. The tool supports the best know conciliation
between e-learning standard and accessibility guidelines, so as to guarantee portability through LCMS together
with the respect of WCAG (AA level) and of the Italian Law on accessibility. Finally, such an high accessibility
level is itself an assurance that our process produces LOs which are compliant to main Web Standards based on
an uniform and simple presentation style.
Compared with literature, our approach combines the idea to automatically process contents to produce SCORM
compliant LOs (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c) with the growing need to meet accessibility
requirements in e-learning (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2002b).
Main future work is devoted to extend the functionalities of the system, by offering supports in creating more
complex contents to the authors (such as rich media contents and conceptual maps) by ensuring accessibility and
universality of the results together with simplicity of usage.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially funded by MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research) and was
supported by CRIAD (www.criad.unibo.it). Authors want to thank Lorenzo Donatiello, Simone Martini, Marco
Roccetti, Nelda Parisini and all the colleagues that supported this work with their precious suggestions. Finally
authors want to thank ASPHI Onlus Foundation (www.asphi.it) that supported tests with users.
References
4system (2006). WBTExpress 5.1, retrieved June, 2006 from: http://www.wbtexpress.com/.
13