Access For all to eLearning

The paper describes the authors' work (in collaboration with others) to establish a new technological paradigm for delivering access to e-Learning to all persons, including disabled students. The new paradigm complements a content-oriented approach to accessibility but shifts the balance and responsibility for determining access needs of an individual from the producer, supplier or author of e-Learning system and content towards the individual and the individual's supporting technological and human agents. Thus, instead of a producer or supplier effectively saying with technology "I know what you need" a learner will say "this is what I need". Firstly the topic is introduced and set in context. Then an overview is given of the roles of the pertinent metadata specifications: personal needs and preference profiles (PNP) [1]; and digital resource descriptions (DRD) [2](using the ISO terminology). An account is given of the work to develop and standardise these. A key implementation of Content Personalisation (CP), based on these metadata standards is taking place in the EU4ALL project. The project is introduced; its approach to CP outlined and implementation challenges are described. Concluding comments are made highlighting key points from the paper and noting the state-of-the-art