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

EDU-EX: a tool for auto-regulated IntelligentTutoring systems development based on models

In recent years there has been an upsurge in forms of instruction that envisage a permanent and ongoing involvement in education of novel concepts such as planned and personalised instruction and autonomous learning. A large number of problems that arise ineducation today may be solved by introducing new technologies into the educational environment, as they allow the form and content of tutoring systems to be tailored to each individual.The application of Artificial Intelligence techniques is helping open up new prospects in the field of teaching and learning. Using Artificial Intelligence techniques in education has the advantage of making it possible to represent expert reasoning and knowledge skills, and to take advantage of this experience in education.This study has involved the development of a tool to generate auto-regulated intelligent tutoring systems based on models. This form of representation makes it possible to break down, organise and represent information so as to enable the easy creation of functionalintelligent computerised tutoring systems. Information about the subject in question, about inference mechanisms, and of a pedagogical nature (independent of any one strategy) is allseparated. The tool also enables knowledge acquired by a student to be constantly monitored with a view to auto-regulating the course contents

Accessible Interface for Multimedia Presentation in Inclusive Education

[Poster] 12th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'07), 25-27th June, 2007, Dundee (Scotland)Among the technological solutions to achieve an inclusive education, the educative electronic accessible resources providing content adaptability is an alternative which reduces discrimination. It also favors the inclusion with right equalities which can be used by students regardless of their specific need and use contexts. Following this line of adaptability of contents on the web, a practical case [1] has been launched: an accessible interface of a multimedia resource with caption and audiodescription that offers the user the control over the decision of which sound and/or visual alternatives he wants to be introduced to. This resource has been designed with Universal Design criteria which are found in the Inclusive Design methodological frameworkPublicad

Design for All in multimedia guides for museums

The Design for All principles define the characteristics which a device should possess in order for it be utilised by every type of user, independent of his or her sensory disabilities or technological competency. These principles are realised in the current work as an integrative tool with which to facilitate universal access to museums via multimedia and portable guides, making access available to all. Based on these principles, this article describes the main findings of the design and use of the MGA (Multimedia Guides for All) approach proposed in this paper. This approach involves a series of recommendations for the selection, application, preparation of content, and maintenance of this type of computerized device, in order to achieve these principles. Firstly, a comparative analysis of the principal types of electronic guides available in museums which incorporate accessibility criteria is provided. Subsequently, a real case study case is presented which conforms to the MGA approach. The MGA approach can be applied to other domains, which should be explored in further research. The conclusions in this article have been drawn from two R&D projects financed by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology supported by the EC FEDER R&D Program.this article have been drawn from two R&D projects financed by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology supported by the EC FEDER R&D Program.Publicad

New communication technologies for inclusive education in and outside the classroom

This chapter explores new communication technologies and methods for avoiding accessibility and communication barriers in the educational environment. It is focused on providing real-time captions so students with hearing disabilities and foreign students, among others, could participate in an inclusive way in and outside the classroom. The inclusive proposals are based on the APEINTA educational project, which aims for accessible education for all. The research work proposes the use of mobile devices for teacher and students in order to provide more flexibility using the APEINTA real-time captioning service. This allows using this service from anywhere and at anytime, not only in the classroom.APEINTA is the result of collaboration among the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electronic Technology, Universidad Carlos III, and the Spanish Centre of Captioning and Audiodescription (CESyA)1. This project was initially supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (2007 I+D projects - EA2008-0312) within the program of Studies and Analyses - Actions to Improve the Quality of Higher Education and the Activity of University Professors. Currently, the research presented in this chapter is being partially supported by France Telecom España S.A. and the MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542), GEMMA (TSI-020302-2010-141) and SAGAS (TSI-020100-2010-184) research projects.Publicad

Prestaciones de la Normalización del Rostro en el Reconocimiento Facial

10 pages, 4 figures.-- Contributed to: V Jornadas de Reconocimiento Biométrico de Personas (JRBP 2010, Huesca, Spain, Sep 2-3, 2010).En este trabajo se estudia la influencia de la normalización facial sobre las prestaciones globales de un sistema de reconocimiento. Para ello se evalúan las prestaciones de un sistema basado en Principal Component Analysis (PCA) cuando se aplica normalización facial mediante Active Shape Models (ASM) en un escenario de verificación de identidad.Este trabajo ha sido desarrollado dentro del Proyecto BRAVO (TIN2007-67407-C03-01), financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.Publicad

Monitoring Accessibility Services in Digital Television

This paper addresses methodology and tools applied to the monitoring of accessibility services in digital television at a time when the principles of accessibility and design are being considered in all new audiovisual media communication services. The main objective of this research is to measure the quality and quantity of existing accessibility services offered by digital terrestrial television (DTT). The preliminary results, presented here, offer the development of a prototype for automatic monitoring and a methodology for obtaining quality measurements, along with the conclusions drawn by initial studies carried out in Spain. The recent approval of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities gives special relevance to this research because it provides valuable guidelines to help set the priorities to improve services currently available to users.This research work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (Avanza I+D programme) and The Spanish Centre of Captioning and Audio DescriptionPublicad

Semantic Annotatiion Architecture for Accesible Multimedia Resources

The semantic annotation (SA) of resources in general, and particularly of multimedia resources, is an arduous task which developments in automatic annotation mechanisms have not been able to realize until now with sufficiently accurate results. Concurrently, initiatives which focus on the accessibility and regulation of multimedia resources are becoming ever greater in number. Accessibility may be achieved, among other alternatives, by means of the subtitling and audio description of multimedia contents. This paper presents a platform which enables the SA of multimedia content when the subtitling and audio description tasks are being carried out

Tablet PC and Head Mounted Display for Live Closed Captioning in Education

Proceedings of: ICCE 2011: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), 9-12 January 2011, Las Vegas (Nevada, USA)Automatic Speech Recognition is a powerful tool for inclusive education. Captioning helps disabled students but distract other students. We propose and evaluate the use of Tablets PC and Head Mounted Displays for live closed captionin