Accessibility Interoperability
When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched their Web Accessibility Initiative in 1997 the focus was on accessibility to web content in general, not learning per se. There are significant standards efforts on accessibility taking place in ISO, IEC, ITU and the national and regional standards bodies as well as various consortia/fora and user groups. Accessibility issues are cutting across all the other standards and specifications for learning technologies. However, even if national and local authorities seem to think that the accessibility issues are solved by referring to WAI guidelines, the efforts to enhance accessibility to e-learning is still in its infancy.
Accessibility specifications state of art
IMS Global Learning Consortium has developed AccessForAll Meta-data Specification (ACCMD) and Learner Information Package Accessibility for LIP specification (ACCLIP). The latter is an inclusive model for describing and recording user preferences for content, display, and control of interfaces. ACCMD defines metadata for resources that match the terminology in a user's profile and allow content systems to select appropriate resources, thereby providing user experiences that adapt to individual needs.
IMS ACCLIP and ACCMD were in 2004 presented to ISO/IEC for formal standardisation. Subcommittee 36 of Joint Committee 1 in ISO has now ready for publishing a three parts standard (ISO 24751) that makes it possible to describe and specify learner needs and preferences on the one hand, and the corresponding description of the digital learning resources on the other hand so that individual learner preferences and needs can be matched with the appropriate user interface tools and digital learning resources.
Part 2 is about the Learners Accessibility needs and preferences, including:
- how digital resources are to be displayed and structured,
- how digital resources are to be controlled and operated, and
- what supplementary or alternative digital resources are to be supplied.
Part 3 is about the description of the characteristics of the resource that affect how it can be perceived, understood or interacted with by a user, including:
- what sensory modalities are used in the resource,
- the ways in which the resource is adaptable (i.e. whether text can be transformed automatically),
- the methods of input the resource accepts, and
- the available alternatives (ISO 24751-3).
Issues
The main concern for Accessibility Interoperability is to shift the focus from design for disabilities to design for all. Now accessibility is very much design for access to single objects. A more holistic approach to accessibility of equipment, services and learning opportunities could benefit all users, not only persons with special needs. The WAI guidelines cover the syntactical accessibility, making it easy to test automatically if a web pages conform to accessibility requirements. However, stimulating to "designing to the test" does not improve accessibility to learning. Then semantic and procedural aspects of electronic communication must be taken into consideration.
The main challenge is to stimulate the creations of alternatives in stead of just having "cosmetic" transformations of digital resources.
It is a stakeholders concern that some of the national legislation (e.g. Section 508 in the US) might block the development of more appropriate standards for accessibility of learning technologies. It is also, according to the community of experts, a danger of premature standardisation.
Recommendations
To improve accessibility to learning opportunities we should develop profiles and guides for the learning, education and training domain that would help us to gain more from a number of existing specifications, e.g. W3C's guidelines, a number of IMS specifications, etc. We should also develop guidelines how to provide alternative representations of learning resources and exploit the interactive capabilities of e-learning tools to ensure accessibility. Web services could enhance the accessibility capabilities of a number of technologies. Last and not least, we need to strengthen the awareness of the accessibility issues in the e-learning community.
To ensure accessibility interoperability among different learning technologies, accessibility information should be embedded in all learning technologies.
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