October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4

3. Ease of editing and updating: whenever the authoring process starts with a conversion step, it oftentimes
becomes a one-way process that cannot be repeated at will, but it costs money and time and requires
expertise to be done several times. The conversion process raises difficulties in regularly editing and
updating the published material, and constrains users to directly edit the converted material rather than the
source documents which were originally used before the conversion.
4. Standards support: the tool should generate learning objects that can be read by a large variety of
commercial and open source e-learning platforms. It practically means that such a tool should produce
learning objects according to some major e-learning standards, defined by different standardization
organization.
5. Visual Homogeneity: the tool should produce content that easily undergoes platform- and site-specific styles
and look&feel, by fully and easily adapting any content to the templating and styling locally mechanism
adopted.
6. Universality: the tool should generate content which under appropriate conditions (e.g., the choice of
different and independent templates), can be fully and at best quality displayed on a wide variety of
applications, including non-dominant versions of browsers and operating systems, older versions of
browsers and operating systems, new and emerging hardware devices (such as PDAs, cellular phones,
interactive TV sets, etc.).
7. Accessibility: the tool should create fully accessible content according to international standards and
national laws. It should fully assist the author, silently generating the accessible structures that can be
automatically deduced from existing content, and prompting the author in providing anything cannot be
automatically generated (e.g., the textual description of images).
Accessibility is of paramount importance, especially when dealing with e-learning applications: learners with
disabilities can benefit a great advantage from e-learning, not simply because it allows distant and flexible
learning activities, but mainly because it could support impaired students in overcoming barriers to resources
which would otherwise be hard to access (Salomoni et al., 2004). In particular, learners with difficulties in
accessing to printed materials (i.e. people with visual impairments) can take a great advantage of the integration
of digital materials into teaching practice. Across the world, laws are in place or under definition to ensure that
interactive/on-line services and, sometimes, specifically e-learning, are made accessible to citizen with
disabilities (Italian Parliament, 2004; U.S. Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998, 1998). Two main strategies,
combined together, are used in order to meet accessible requirements:
Appropriate use of W3C standard compliant technologies, in order to enhance interoperability and
portability (World Wide Web Consortium, 2000; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999b; World Wide Web
Consortium, 2001b).
Use of alternative versions of inaccessible content, in order to accommodate different users, e.g., students
using limited or obsolete devices and/or students with sensorial impairments (IMS Global Learning
Consortium, 2002b; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999a; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c).
In this paper we present a methodology and some tools for the creation and management of accessible and
universal learning objects (LO) which considerably improves the process across the seven mentioned
dimensions. Our methodology involves different tools, from widespread text editors, which are used by authors
to easily produce content, till an ad-hoc application, called ISA-BeL, designed and implemented to support
automatic production of standard compliant e-learning materials. The process has been widely used to publish
about 40 learning modules which are currently in use by our University for several e-learning activities in a
number of subjects. Accessibility of the whole process and all the produced LOs have been verified on the field.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some background information about
authoring e-learning content platform. Section 3 introduces the creation and management process in e-learning
contexts using ISA-BeL, while section 4 fully details a use-case in producing accessible and standard e-learning
materials by using ISA-BeL. Finally, Section 5 provides some conclusions and suggestions for future works.
Background
Systems and standards
Many recent efforts in the field of knowledge management address e-learning, i.e., distance learning based on
the use of personal computers. Systems providing e-learning services can be divided in two main categories:
LMSs (Learning Management Systems), which are web-based platforms by actually providing content to the
users and LCMSs (Learning Content Management System), the authoring environments used to create learning
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