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Nevile, L., & Treviranus, J. (<strong>2006</strong>). Interoperability for Individual Learner Centred Accessibility for Web-based Educational Systems. Educational Technology & Society, 9 (4), 215-227. Interoperability for Individual Learner Centred Accessibility for Web-based Educational Systems Liddy Nevile La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia Tel: +61 4 1931 2902 liddy@sunriseresearch.org Jutta Treviranus University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Tel: +1 416 978 5240 jutta.treviranus@utoronto.ca ABSTRACT This paper describes the interoperability underpinning a new strategy for delivering accessible computerbased resources to individual learners based on their specified needs and preferences in the circumstances in which they are operating. The new accessibility strategy, known as AccessForAll, augments the model of universal accessibility of resources by engaging automated systems and builds upon the previous development of libraries of suitable resources and components. It focuses on individual learners and their particular accessibility needs and preferences. It fits within an inclusive framework for educational accommodation that supports accessibility, mobility, cultural, language and location appropriateness and increases educational flexibility. Its effectiveness will depend upon widespread use that will exploit the ‘network effect’ to increase the content available for accessibility and distribute the responsibility for the availability of accessible resources across the globe. Widespread use will depend upon the interoperability of AccessForAll implementations that, in turn, will depend on the success of the four major aspects of their interoperability: structure, syntax, semantics and systemic adoption. Keywords E-learning systems, Interoperability, Accessibility, AccessForAll, Learner profiles, Resource descriptions Introduction This paper describes the effort to give effect to the interoperability goals of a new strategy for delivering accessible computer-based resources to learners based on their immediate specific needs and preferences. There are many reasons why learners have different needs and preferences with respect to their use of digital resources, including because they have disabilities. Instead of classifying people by their disabilities, the ‘AccessForAll’ approach emphasizes the resulting needs in an information model for formal structured descriptions of those needs and the resources available. It provides a common language for describing the needs and preferences of all people, for whatever reason their accessibility is hampered, when they have special requirements. It may be useful to those who are simply trying to gain access to information in a language other than one they comprehend. It will be essential for those with very restricted access capabilities. AccessForAll uses the same formal, structured information model for describing the needs and preferences of users and the accessibility characteristics of resources. Both sets of descriptions are required so resources can be matched to the needs and preferences of the learner. The goal is to enable systems to share the benefits and burdens of making resources accessible. It must be easy to record the necessary information and it must be in a form that will make it most useful and interoperable. There is no doubt that an important aspect of achieving interoperability is the widespread adoption of common solutions to problems. The new framework aims, where possible, to inherit this from extensively used specifications and standards. In addition, it will depend on the widespread availability of suitable resources, appropriately described. In the case of educational resources and services, there are many major communities concerned with relevant aspects of descriptive standards and of those, a number have been engaged in the development of the AccessForAll model. Cross-domain metadata also has well-established standards that have been considered. The model is based on a set of principles that, when implemented in a variety of standard languages or systems, should maintain their interoperability at structural, syntactic and semantic levels. It also depends upon widespread systemic adoption to generate the required volume of information about available accessible components. ISSN 1436-4522 (online) and 1176-3647 (print). © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). The authors and the forum jointly retain the copyright of the articles. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the editors at kinshuk@ieee.org. 215
The AccessForAll strategy complements work about how to make resources as accessible as possible (universally accessible) done primarily by the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI). The focus of that work is technical specifications for the representation and encoding of content and services, to ensure that they are simultaneously accessible to as many people as possible. W3C also develops protocols and languages that become industry standards to promote interoperability for the creation, publication, acquisition and rendering of resources. Similarly, the strategy complements the work of organizations such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), The Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), the Speech-to-Text Services Network and similar institutions in other parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, the RNIB developed and maintains the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) for people with vision disabilities (Chapman, 2002). The American NLS maintains a Union Catalogue (BPHP) and a file of In-Process Publications (BPHI) that can both be searched via the NLS website. The Speech-to-Text Services Network (STSN) makes accessible content alternatives for content that cannot be used by people with hearing disabilities. They offer three types of services based on the technology used: Steno machine-based systems, commonly called CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), Laptop-based speed typing software systems (C-Print and TypeWell) and Laptop-based Automatic Speech Recognition software systems (e.g., CaptionMic, iCommunicator). Such organizations provide access to resources through catalogues but as most of them pre-dated the Web, and certainly the widespread use of metadata as it is used today, their records are not in a common form and they do not all contain the same information in the same structure or syntax. Their catalogues provide search facilities of the type upon which the new AccessForAll strategy needs to be built. The focus of AccessForAll is ensuring that the composition of resources, when delivered, is accessible from the particular learner’s immediate perspective. It complements the W3C work by enabling a situation where a particular suitable resource is discoverable and accessible to an individual learner even when it may not be accessible to all learners. In some cases, this may mean discovery and provision of alternative, supplementary or additional resource components to increase the accessibility of an original resource. In such a case, those institutions that already have suitable resources may be able to lead to their discovery. The distinguishing feature of AccessForAll is that it depends upon software to manage the process of determining if the resources are suitable and, if not, replacing or augmenting them with the necessary resources. It assembles distributed, sometimes cumulatively-created, content into accessible resources and so is not wholly dependent upon the universal accessibility of the original resource and goes farther than mere discovery of a suitable resource. The AccessForAll specifications, while initiated in the educational community, are suitable for any user in any computer-mediated context. These contexts may include e-government, e-commerce, e-health and more. Their use in education will be enhanced if they are adopted across a broad range of domains and used to describe the accessibility of resources available to be used in education even if that was not their initial purpose. The AccessForAll specifications can be used in a number of ways, including: to provide information about how to configure workstations or software applications; to configure the display and control of on-line resources; to search for and retrieve appropriate resources; to help evaluate the suitability of resources for a learner, and in the sharing and aggregation of resources. The AccessForAll specifications are designed to gain extra value from what is known as the ‘network effect’: the more accessible content becomes available, the more likely accessible components will be available for individual learners; the more people use the specifications, the more there will be opportunities for interchange of resources or resource components, and the more opportunities there are, the more accessibility there will be for learners. Early versions of the specifications were developed by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC), at the University of Toronto. They were developed further by collaboration between IMS Global Learning Consortium; the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Accessibility Working Group, and others. They have been considered formally by CEN ISSS MMI-DC, CEN ISSS (WS-LT) and ISO JTC1 SC36 as well as at the national level by government agencies in Canada, the UK, and Australia. Provision of Networked Accessible Resources There are a number of approaches to making networked resources accessible, whether on the Internet or on an Intranet. 216
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Guidelines for authors Submissions
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How Does Educational Technology Ben
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Adaptivity is one of the most impor
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3. Ease of editing and updating: wh
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Accessible and personalized Learnin
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Verifying contents Figure 3. The pa
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Figure 7. The ISA on line interface
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Adaptive Technology Resource Centre
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World Wide Web Consortium (1999a).
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guiding and supporting environment
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As an example, to improve the acces
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option). Although this finding migh
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of eLearning content and enhance th
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Hodgings, W. & Duval, E. (2002). IE
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the entire course of study. This sy
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Nr of student 25 20 15 10 5 0 a - w
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Vincenzo, a second year student, ne
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Evaluation Recently embodied conver
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Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C., & de Rosi
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Lanzilotti, R., Ardito, C., & Costa
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quality in use, which is measured b
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process of designing high quality c
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eLSE methodology Designers and eval
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Execution phase Execution phase act
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on the inspection process and, cons
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Piccinini, N., & Scollo, G. (2006).
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Answers and reinforcement A.1: Use
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potential project ideas (from pure
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For each column in Table 2, the sum
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educational goals and the various r
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A new computerized Records Manageme
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any distributed community include b
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message in order to obtain a respon
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Figure 3. Social network after intr
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increased face-to-face collaboratio
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References Bogenrieder, I. (2002).
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Donoghue, S. L. (2006). Institution
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contemplate part-time, rather than
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greater flexibility in course selec
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Cost-benefit One distinct benefit o
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Resources The development of online
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courses where it is has little pote
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A fellowship programme, such as the
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Moore, M.G. (1998). Introduction. I
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Software reuse has two dimensions,
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Courseware development process mode
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Didactics analysis This phase consi
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Process didactics design We focus o
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The repository is organized into co
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the analysis and the design phase o
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Figure 12. Weaving content and dida
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complete user-specific (author, ins
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References ADL (Advanced Distribute
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Bender, D. M., & Vredevoogd, J. D.
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(see Figure 2). The incorporation o
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Figure 4: Example of Summary Image
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Appendix B The following 44 items r
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Appendix C A Sample of Exam Questio
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Appendix D Perceived Usefulness Que
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Kirkpatrick, and Peck (2001) have a
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2001). The system thus aims to assi
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a strong agreement between the two
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of the dynasty. 3. Information on
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Comparing works designed using the
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Tselios, N., Stoica, A., Maragoudak
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strategies during their interaction
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P(B|D) is the probability of a netw
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Online help adaptation using Bayesi
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AUSM that will return the most prob
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Figure 7. An example of use of the
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