Facilitating virtual networking for Design for All in Europe: The HERMES platform

This paper reports on HERMES, the virtual networking platform of the European Design for All eAccessibility Network (EDeAN) that was established in 2002 by the European Commission in order to stimulate European network activities within the area of Design for All, with particular focus on ICT and e-Accessibility. The paper reports on the development and utilisation of the networking platform developed to enable the cooperation of EDeAN members through an accessible interface over the World Wide Web. HERMES is available at http://www.edean.or

Incorporating Accessibility in Web-Based Work Environments: Two Alternative Approaches and Issues Involved

The development of online work and collaboration environments presents a number of opportunities as well as challenges, especially for diverse user populations. They can enhance the mobility of workers and, subject to their design, offer access to people with disability and contribute significantly to tackling existing barriers in employment and social inclusion. At present, a number of web-based work environments have been developed; nonetheless, they hardly reach people with disability due to their low conformance with Web accessibility principles. One of the reasons why incorporating accessibility in online environments remains elusive for most Web service providers is that it is difficult for them to choose among the alternative approaches. This paper examines two different approaches of Web accessibility engineering from a provider’s perceptive and in relation to the resources required in each case. In the first approach, interfaces are made accessible by design, whereas the second approach involves the use of “filter and transformation tools” as a means to transform existing non-accessible interfaces into ones that comply with de facto Web accessibility recommendations. Based on the authors’ experience and hands-on practice on both approaches gained in the context of several European and national projects and through the development of fifteen accessible online tools in total, a study was conducted to examine the cost effectiveness of each approach. As a result, a set of practical guidelines are offered here for assisting web service providers in identifying the most appropriate approach with regards to the different needs of any given project

myWebAccess: A platform for repairing, enhancing and re-distributing Web Services accessible to people with disability

International audienceWeb services are an emerging technology which has attracted much attention from both the research and the industry sectors in recent years. The exploitation of web services as components in web applications facilitates development and supports applications interoperability, regardless of the programming language and platform used. However, existing web services development standards do not take into account the fact that the provided content and the interactive functionality should be accessible to, and easily operable by, people with disabilities. This paper presents a platform named myWebAccess, which provides a mechanism for the semi-automated "repair" of web services' interaction characteristics in order to support the automatic generation of interface elements that conform to the de facto standard of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. myWebAccess enhances interaction quality for specific target user groups, including people with visual and motor disabilities, and supports the use of web services on diverse platforms (e.g., mobile phones equipped with a browser). The users of myWebAccess can create a personalized environment containing their favourite services, and can interact with them through interfaces appropriate to their specific individual characteristics

Modélisation probabiliste du style d'apprentissage et application à l'adaptation de contenus pédagogiques indexés par une ontologie

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre général des systèmes d'enseignement adaptatifs. La problématique traitée est l'adaptation de l'activité pédagogique au mode d'apprentissage préféré de l'élève. Les travaux réalisés ont eu pour objectifs de : modéliser les préférences d'apprentissage de l'élève ; modéliser les contenus pédagogiques du domaine à enseigner ; proposer une stratégie d'adaptation qui rapproche les préférences des contenus afin de proposer une méthode pédagogique appropriée. Pour atteindre le premier objectif, la thèse étudie le style d'apprentissage de Felder. Une étude empirique pour établir un modèle de dépendance entre style, pédagogie, et comportement de l'élève a été réalisée. Les résultats ont permis d'établir un modèle de préférences probabiliste. Une méthode en deux étapes pour apprendre ce odèle puis le renforcer est développée. Deux implantations sont proposées : un réseau bayésien et une machine à vecteurs de support. Le contenu quant à lui est modélisé en utilisant une ontologie combinant le domaine, la pédagogie, ainsi que les ressources physiques. Une stratégie d'adaptation structurée sur quatre dimensions est présentée. Celle-ci consiste à rechercher dans le contenu la séquence pédagogique sémantiquement pertinente pour les préférences de l'élève. La recherche s'appuie sur une mesure de similarité sémantique qui est établie. Ce travail a eu un impact sur deux projets européens. En effet, la méthode de production et structuration des contenus, basée sur SCORM, qui est proposée a servi pour le projet UP2UML. L'approche de modélisation de l'élève sert aux recherches sur le profilage dans le projet KPLAB. ABSTRACT : This thesis deals with adaptive teaching systems. The research question is how to adapt pedagogical activities to the prefered learning mode of a student. The scientific objectives are: modelisation of student's learning preferences ; modelisation of adaptive learning contents of a given domain ; establishing an adaptation strategy that maps preferences to contents in order to recommend an appropriate teaching method In order to reach the first objective, the thesis studies the learning style of Felder. An empirical study to derive a dependency model between the style, the pedagogy, and the student behaviour has been conducted. Results led to creating a probabilistic preference model. A two-stage method to learn and reinforce the model is developed. Two implementations are proposed: a bayesian network and an SVM classifier. The content is represented using an ontology that combines the domain, the pedagogy, and the physical resources. An adaptation strategy centered around four dimensions is presented. This consists of searching the content to retrieve the most semantically pertinent pedagogical sequence given the student preferences. The search implements an original semantic similarity measure. This work significantly impacted two European research projects. The production and structuration method designed in this thesis and based on SCORM has been applied in the Leonardo Da Vinci project called UP2UML. The student modeling approche serves currently our research on user profiling in the KPLAB projec

Web Accessibility through Adaptation

Abstract. This paper presents the eAccessibilityEngine tool, which employs adaptation techniques to automatically render web pages accessible by users with different types of disabilities. Specifically, the eAccessibilityEngine is capable of automatically transforming web pages to attain AAA-level conformance to the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and to “Section 508 ” of the US Rehabilitation Act. The proposed tool is intended for use as a web-based service and can be applied to any existing web site.