Adapting e-learning and learning services for people with disabilities

Providing learning materials and support services that are adapted to the needs of individuals has the potential to enable learners to obtain maximal benefit from university level studies. This paper describes EU4ALL project which has been exploring how to present customized learning materials and services for people with disabilities. A number of the technical components of the EU4ALL framework are described. This is followed with a brief description of prototype implementations. This is then followed by a discussion of a number of research directions that may enhance the adaptability, usability and accessibility of information and support systems can be used and consumed by a diverse user population

Enabling learning for all through adaptable personal learning environments

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Accessible Interfaces for Educational Multimedia Contents

Proceedings of: Workshop on Advanced Learning Technologies for Disabled and Non-Disabled People (WALTD 2008), July 1st-July 5th, 2008, Santander, Cantabria, Spain, in conjunction with the 8th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2008)The use of technology is growing in every field of education, and not only in the education of disabled students but also as a learning resource for everybody. The teachers are more and more introducing these digital contents in their lessons and there are many resources related to learning on internet.. If an equal access to these resources is guaranteed, then we can avoid students feeling that their learning capacity is limited due to a possible inaccessibility to them. Inclusive methodologies have to be followed to reach these objectives applying the standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) and rules of accessibility in the design and development of web pages, technical supporting, software, author tools, etc. This papers describes a practical case with two accessible interfaces of multimedia resources implemented with Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL.)Publicad

Rich media content adaptation in e-learning systems

The wide use of e-technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of the population, especially with the aim of reintegrating excluded individuals back into society through education. This is particularly true for people with different types of disabilities who may have difficulties while attending traditional on-site learning programs that are typically based on printed learning resources. The creation and provision of accessible e-learning contents may therefore become a key factor in enabling people with different access needs to enjoy quality learning experiences and services. Another e-learning challenge is represented by m-learning (which stands for mobile learning), which is emerging as a consequence of mobile terminals diffusion and provides the opportunity to browse didactical materials everywhere, outside places that are traditionally devoted to education. Both such situations share the need to access materials in limited conditions and collide with the growing use of rich media in didactical contents, which are designed to be enjoyed without any restriction. Nowadays, Web-based teaching makes great use of multimedia technologies, ranging from Flash animations to prerecorded video-lectures. Rich media in e-learning can offer significant potential in enhancing the learning environment, through helping to increase access to education, enhance the learning experience and support multiple learning styles. Moreover, they can often be used to improve the structure of Web-based courses. These highly variegated and structured contents may significantly improve the quality and the effectiveness of educational activities for learners. For example, rich media contents allow us to describe complex concepts and process flows. Audio and video elements may be utilized to add a “human touch” to distance-learning courses. Finally, real lectures may be recorded and distributed to integrate or enrich on line materials. A confirmation of the advantages of these approaches can be seen in the exponential growth of video-lecture availability on the net, due to the ease of recording and delivering activities which take place in a traditional classroom. Furthermore, the wide use of assistive technologies for learners with disabilities injects new life into e-learning systems. E-learning allows distance and flexible educational activities, thus helping disabled learners to access resources which would otherwise present significant barriers for them. For instance, students with visual impairments have difficulties in reading traditional visual materials, deaf learners have trouble in following traditional (spoken) lectures, people with motion disabilities have problems in attending on-site programs. As already mentioned, the use of wireless technologies and pervasive computing may really enhance the educational learner experience by offering mobile e-learning services that can be accessed by handheld devices. This new paradigm of educational content distribution maximizes the benefits for learners since it enables users to overcome constraints imposed by the surrounding environment. While certainly helpful for users without disabilities, we believe that the use of newmobile technologies may also become a fundamental tool for impaired learners, since it frees them from sitting in front of a PC. In this way, educational activities can be enjoyed by all the users, without hindrance, thus increasing the social inclusion of non-typical learners. While the provision of fully accessible and portable video-lectures may be extremely useful for students, it is widely recognized that structuring and managing rich media contents for mobile learning services are complex and expensive tasks. Indeed, major difficulties originate from the basic need to provide a textual equivalent for each media resource composing a rich media Learning Object (LO). Moreover, tests need to be carried out to establish whether a given LO is fully accessible to all kinds of learners. Unfortunately, both these tasks are truly time-consuming processes, depending on the type of contents the teacher is writing and on the authoring tool he/she is using. Due to these difficulties, online LOs are often distributed as partially accessible or totally inaccessible content. Bearing this in mind, this thesis aims to discuss the key issues of a system we have developed to deliver accessible, customized or nomadic learning experiences to learners with different access needs and skills. To reduce the risk of excluding users with particular access capabilities, our system exploits Learning Objects (LOs) which are dynamically adapted and transcoded based on the specific needs of non-typical users and on the barriers that they can encounter in the environment. The basic idea is to dynamically adapt contents, by selecting them from a set of media resources packaged in SCORM-compliant LOs and stored in a self-adapting format. The system schedules and orchestrates a set of transcoding processes based on specific learner needs, so as to produce a customized LO that can be fully enjoyed by any (impaired or mobile) student

Metadata for user-centred, inclusive access to digital resources: realising the theory of AccessForAll Accessibility

To be inclusive, the Web needs published resources to be matched to individual users’ needs and preferences for their perception and control. In a decade, this has not been achieved and many cannot make use of resources despite having appropriate facilities. This thesis argues that the necessary management of resources can be achieved with well-designed metadata. Demonstration and explanation of the accessibility problems, efforts to solve them and the current state of inaccessibility of Web resources, any resource that is available through the World Wide Web, is fundamental to the research. The author relies heavily on Dublin Core metadata as it is relatively easy to use; is probably the most populous metadata; can be managed with free software systems, and for commercial reasons. The research investigated what makes DC metadata, so apparently simple, powerful enough to be the most popular metadata because there is very little available that explains this. The thesis then documents the scientific view of metadata upon which effective use of metadata can be based in the context of accessibility. It argues, at a practical level, that metadata is essential and integral to any shift to an on-going process approach to accessibility. It contributes to the science of metadata in as much as it analyses, synthesizes, and articulates the characteristics of an essential infrastructure for a new approach to accessibility. The author argues in favour of an on-going process approach to accessibility of resources that supports continuous improvement of any given resource, not necessarily by the author of the resource, and not necessarily by design or with knowledge of the original author, by contributors who may be distributed globally. The thesis argues that the current dependence on production guidelines and post-production evaluation of resources as either universally accessible or otherwise, does not adequately provide for either the accessibility necessary for individuals or the continuous or evolutionary approach possible within the current Web environment. It argues that a distributed, social-networking view of the Web as interactive, combined with a social model of disability, given the management tools of machine-readable, interoperable AccessForAll metadata, as developed, can achieve the desired goals. It raises issues regarding its implementation in the distributed environment of the Web

Adaptación de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje a las preferencias y necesidades personales del estudiante

La evolución de la sociedad no incide de igual manera en todas las personas, sino que se focaliza en el grupo de personas mayoritario, aquellas sin diferentes capacidades funcionales, produciendo una diferencia entre los distintos colectivos sociales que en términos de tecnología es denominada brecha digital. El acceso igualitario a los servicios ofrecidos a la sociedad se consigue mediante la transformación de estos, en servicios accesibles para todas las personas. El principal objetivo de esta tesis es la contribución a la investigación en el desarrollo de la accesibilidad en el ámbito de la educación virtual. El procedimiento seguido ha sido la aplicación de los estándares ISO/IEC 24751 e IMS AFA 3.0 a la elaboración de un modelo de adaptación de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje, que establece pautas básicas para convertir de forma eficaz sistemas de gestión de aprendizaje en entornos accesibles a personas con capacidades diferentes, y su validación mediante el desarrollo de un prototipo. El trabajo se ha realizado en cinco etapas (recogida de datos, delineación de las pautas básicas del modelo, aplicación a un prototipo de plataforma educativa, evaluación de su efectividad y estimación de su utilidad y facilidad de uso), que han sido necesarias para garantizar un modelo efectivo que proporcione ámbitos educativos virtuales fáciles de usar. De estas fases se han derivado tres artículos que han sido publicados en revistas de impacto. El primer artículo especifica las directrices fundamentales del modelo, extraídas de los estándares internacionales ISO/IEC 24751 e IMS AFA 3.0, que guían el proceso y describen las pautas necesarias concebidas para asegurar la efectividad y la calidad requerida por todo sistema y por los estándares estudiados. El artículo también muestra la aplicación de este modelo a un prototipo de plataforma de aprendizaje detallando las peculiaridades que le confieren características como robustez, portabilidad, escalabilidad, eficiencia y reutilización. El segundo artículo tiene como objetivo comprobar la efectividad de la herramienta desarrollada, mediante la evaluación del rendimiento de aprendizaje de grupos de estudiantes con diferentes capacidades al usar la aplicación. La evaluación se realizó mediante la comparación de un pre-test antes de la adaptación y un post-test después de esta. El tercer artículo investiga la facilidad de uso del sistema y la actitud de los estudiantes frente a su utilidad, para verificar su usabilidad y detectar los puntos que puedan mejorarse en futuros trabajos.Citizens are not guaranteed equal access to education despite the evolution of services and information technology. People with different capabilities have not been given rights to virtual education, and there is a digital divide between individuals with functional capabilities and those with limitations such as hearing or seeing problems. The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to research on the development of accessibility in the field of virtual education. The procedure followed was the application of ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0 standards to the development of a model for adapting virtual learning environments that establishes basic guidelines for effectively converting learning management systems into environments accessible to people with different capabilities and its validation through the creation of a prototype. The work was carried out in five phases (data collection, outlining the basic guidelines of the model, application of guidelines to a prototype educational platform, evaluation of its effectiveness and estimation of its usefulness and ease of use), necessary to guarantee an effective model that provides user-friendly virtual educational environments. These phases have resulted in three articles that have been published in high impact journals. The first article specifies the fundamental guidelines of the model extracted from international standards (ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0), which guide the process and describes the necessary guiding principles designed to ensure the effectiveness and quality required by any system and by the standards studied. The article also shows the application of this model to a prototype learning platform detailing the properties that give it characteristics such as robustness, portability, scalability, efficiency and reusability. The second article aims to test the effectiveness of the developed tool by evaluating the learning performance of groups of students with different capabilities when using the application. The evaluation was performed by comparing a pre-test before the adaptation and a post-test after it. The third article investigates the ease of use of the system and the students’ attitude towards its usefulness to verify its usability and detect points that can be improved in future work

Improving Accessibility in Online Education: Comparative Analysis of Attitudes of Blind and Deaf Students Toward an Adapted Learning Platform

15 p.People with different capacities, such as the deaf and blind, have problems accessing educational content due to lack of accessible technology. Accessibility and usability are closely related concepts that share the goals for a satisfactory user experience. Existing literature establishes a direct relation between accessibility and usability, and reports that there are problems with both in learning platforms, and more generally with most websites. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the accessibility and usability of a learning platform by interrogating its participants. Three groups of students with different capacities (blind, deaf and deaf-blind) used an accessible learning platform prototype to assess the accessibility and usability of the platform and its contents. This article presents a comparative study of the perception and attitude of blind and deaf students towards the use of a learning platform adapted to their personal needs. Results showed that their attitude to the adaptation was very positive but there were differences in the perception of the ease of use of the application and with the level of difficulty to access the learning content. This work contributes to the body of knowledge by showing the effects that adaptations have on learning contents for blind and deaf students in terms of accessibility and ease of use through the analysis of the perceptions of participants. Future work may consider increasing the sample of students, as well as developing and testing new technologies and approaches that address other forms of functional diversit

Avoiding communication barriers in the classroom: the APEINTA project

Education is a fundamental human right, however unfortunately not everybody has the same learning opportunities. For instance, if a student has hearing impairments, s/he could face communications barriers in the classroom, which could affect his/her learning process. APEINTA is a Spanish educational project that aims for inclusive education for all. This project proposes two main accessible initiatives: (1) real-time captioning and text-to-speech (TTS) services in the classroom and (2) accessible Web-learning platform out of the classroom with accessible digital resources. This paper presents the inclusive initiatives of APEINTA. Also an evaluation of the into-the-classroom initiative (real-time captioning and TTS services) is presented. This evaluation has been conducted during a regular undergraduate course at a university and during a seminar at an integration school for deaf children. Forty-five hearing students, 1 foreign student, 3 experts in captioning, usability and accessibility, and 20 students with hearing impairments evaluated these services in the classroom. Evaluation results show that these initiatives are adequate to be used in the classroom and that students are satisfied with them.Publicad