Status of delivery This chapter will not be finished till the Project Meeting in Madrid May 23rd. At the meeting I hope I will be able to present Erlend's outline of the chapter and a plan for when a draft will be ready for comments. -Tore

Accessibility summary from the life meeting
This document goes to the InterMedia Confluence wiki (http://www.intermedia.uio.no/confluence/life/home/) and is in confluence syntax:

LIFE Accessibility

• Why accessibility in a LIFE context.
• The importance of barrier free education to all.
• Accessibility within ITLET

What is accessibility (Introduction)

Accessibility is about giving all the possibility to participate in the society, free of barriers; of physical, logical or practical constraints.
In the LIFE project, we have investigated accessibility with regard to on-line ICT based learning, and tried to identify key-issues that are important for Learning Interoperability, so that all citizens of Europe can participate in a Learning Society free of any barriers.
There is no good reason for not providing Learning free of barriers within an ICT environment - that is - if the organisations plan for accessibility from the beginning. In today's ICD environment barriers are constructed either by design or by lack of knowledge on how to develop ICT systems free of barriers accessible to all.
This realisation is of great importance, and should be used as a starting point when evaluating and deciding on how to move forward with the process of ensuring ICT barrier free systems.
When done properly there should be no extra cost in the development process of ensuring accessibility.

When addressing accessibility issues we usually think of people with a specific accessibility or lacking a set of capabilities, i.e. hearing, seeing or the ability to move around. However this group is only a small group of users of ICT systems that have problems with accessing information and the possibility to participate actively in the modern society. And the possibility to actively participate is one of the key fundaments in our democracies.

The better education a person have the better the possibility to participate in the society therefor is accessibility of great importance with regard to learning and learning technologies.

Maybe one of the most important principles when dealing with accessibility is predictability, the possibility to predict the behaviour of ICT systems, how information is presented, where it is presented, the interaction schemes when performing tasks and communicating with the systems. Usually this issues are consistent within one systems, but when moving to another system this changes, and the nomadic users need to learn a new way on how to communicate with different systems.

Building systems with foundations based on established conventions and best practice is crucial when developing ICT systems for accessibility.

Issues to consider About possibility to participate in a modern society About general democratic principles About not discriminating user groups based on capabilities Not only for user groups with disabilities (sight/hearing/etc.) Affects all users - in one way or another Predictability Common set of assumptions (navigation/placement/userinterfaces) example: location of pedals in a car - numbering of floors in a building - meaning of traffic signs - interactions when meeting other people/offices/

Accessibility to Learning - Learning technologies

What differs

Issues to consider What are the differences between Learning and other activities Identify specific requirements for learning Universal right to access learning Learning resources Learning tools System accommodates Learning portals Unnecessary complexity in LMS's

Standards

Issues to consider WAI WCAG ATAG ISO 24751 IMS JTC1/SWG-A Activities - goals - results so far - etc. Need to look into documents from the latest meeting.. (http://www.jtc1access.org/)

Summary of position statements

Issues to consider Andy Foreword from 24751

Trends in accessibility

When developing web-based learning material or web-based information accessibility issues are addressed by following some guidelines and good-practice with the idea of "one size fits all". By following the guidelines a minimum set of accessibility are achieved and scaffolding tools for users with special needs can effectively process this minimum set of accessibility information. The most important accessibility guidelines are developed by W3C in their WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and this guidelines have several "levels" of support of accessibility from A to AAA, where A is the minimum set of guides that should be followed. The WAI guidelines have information about how to use HTML properly, what tags and attributes to use, and how to use CSS to achieve accessible web-sites.

Some systems have one resource of information - usually in XML - and then to different set of transformation of this information based on the users preferences. Based on the users preferences these systems gives you the possibility to choose from different CSS's to control the presentation of the information, to transformation of the information into other formats such as DAISY CHECK::: (http://www.daisy.org/). This transformation of the information have the assumption that the source information have a format (style of language) that suites the user of the information, that the source information suites all media for which it will be presented.
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However this is not usually the case, and we find that several systems provide alternative representation of the information to make sure that the information is accessible. Examples of such alternatives are sites that provide different languages i.e. Norwegian and English.

One of the most important trends within the accessibility community is to provide alternative representation of the information based on the users needs and preferences, examples of such alternatives are video with captioning, sound with transcripts etc.
Such systems are in principal based on two parts, one is the users needs and preferences, and the other is the systems capabilities of providing alternatives and/or transformation of the information provided.
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moments to consider Transformations Simpler HTML Daisy Simpler layouts Providing alternatives Multimedia Spoken alternatives for seeing impaired / Added more spoken information (what goes on type...) Captioning for hearing impaired Elaborate written text for images/illustrations Tables Elaborate explanation of tables Flash Providing explanations for how interactions is performed Requested input through alternative forms Simpler presentation/less rich Based on user need Not on system capabilities Text Simpler text alternatives for non native people Scaffolding for better cultural understanding Scaffolding for explanations of specific terminology Semantic accessibility Procedural accessibility

Consequences for EUN/EU

moments to consider Need to harmonise all portals Need to provide alternatives to multimedia Need to start awareness raising in EUN communities

Summary/conclusions

moments to consider Important field that need more resources...