Valeria Mirabella

A no-frills approach for accessible Web-based learning material

Most of the efforts for supporting the preparation and deployment of accessible Web-based learning material propose guidelines that prevalently address technical accessibility issues. However, little or no consideration is given to the didactical experts, and thus their didactical experience, in the learning material development. Moreover, the aforementioned guidelines tend to provide high-level/generic indications on alternative forms of didactical content for equivalent access of the content. Nonetheless, the sole provision of equivalent forms does not guarantee the retention of desirable user interface aspects such as effectiveness and efficiency. While we do acknowledge the role of such guidelines, we do propose that the didactical experts be provided with a non-technical recourse that can enable them to contribute to the development process of accessible Web-based learning content. In particular, this work proposes tapping into the experience of the didactical experts by providing them with an avenue through which they can appropriately choose relevant and alternative didactical content toward developing and deploying accessible Web-based learning material.

A proposal toward the development of accessible e-learning content by human involvement

Most of the existing efforts for supporting the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible e-learning applications propose guidelines that primarily address technical accessibility issues. Little, if any, consideration is given to the real actors involved in the learning experience, such as didactical experts and disabled learners. Moreover, implementing artifacts addressed to the e-learning world requires a wide range of particular skills which are related not only to technical but also to didactical, pedagogical, usability, and accessibility aspects of the produced material. This paper argues that the know-how of a number of stakeholders should be blended into a joint design activity, and that it should be possible to determine the role of each participant in the successive phases of the development lifecycle of e-learning applications. The paper sketches the methodological guidelines of a design framework based on involving the users with disabilities, as well as pedagogical experts, in the development process. The novelty of this proposal mainly stems from being built up around the core of strategies and choices specifically bound to accessibility requirements. Characteristic elements of learner-centered design are then further integrated into processes and methodologies which are typical of participatory and contextual design approaches. Following such guidelines, it will be possible to gain a deeper understanding of the requirements and of the operational context of people needing accessible material, either as learners or educators. The underlying objective is to increase the potential to realize learning systems that better meet different user needs and that provide a more satisfying learning experience. Moreover, when people get involved in the development process, they gain a sense of ownership of the system and are therefore more likely to accept and “promote” it.

Supporting cognitive walkthrough with video data: a mobile learning evaluation study

Although expert-based evaluation techniques such as heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough are often inexpensive and quick to apply, they have not proved to be effective in capturing contextual factors that arise in real-world settings. It is no trivial issue to understand how such evaluation techniques could be modified or differently applied so as to better take into account context, without loosing the advantages inherent in those techniques. This paper explores a possible way of addressing the trade-off between application of cognitive walkthrough and low cost improvements of its contextual validity. In particular, we propose and investigate the benefits of supporting cognitive walkthrough with video data about user interaction with an eLearning course on mobile device. Initial results from this study indicated that video data provided evaluators with a more detailed understanding of user characteristics and interaction contexts, leading to an improvement of their assessments in terms of the total number of systems flaws detected. Video data was regarded by experts as both relevant and useful, especially for tuning the evaluation focus on types of difficulties they would normally not have experienced because of differences in terms of abilities, knowledge and background with those of the target user group.

Accessible e-learning material: a no-frills avenue for didactical experts

Different organizations adopt accessibility for various and diverse reasons. Interesting and inspiring as such reasons may be, it is important to ensure that the motivation for supporting accessibility is that it is the right thing to do, i.e. a commitment to the provision of equal opportunities for accessing resources for people with special needs. Among the various efforts for supporting the development of accessible e-learning material, most of them propose guidelines that prevalently address technical accessibility issues (such as the format and navigation of learning material) with little or no consideration for the didactical experts, and thus their didactical experience, in developing learning material. Moreover, the aforementioned guidelines tend to provide generic indications on alternative forms of didactical content for equivalent access to it. None the less, the sole provision of equivalent forms does not guarantee the retention of desirable user interface aspects and may therefore have a negative impact on learning effectiveness. While this paper acknowledges the role of such guidelines, it does propose that the didactical experts be provided with a non-technical recourse, improving their development of accessible e-learning content. By tapping into the experience of the didactical experts, this work provides them with an avenue leading to enhance the accessibility of e-learning material.

Scaffolding the design of accessible eLearning content: a user-centered approach and cognitive perspective

There exist various guidelines for facilitating the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible eLearning applications and contents. However, such guidelines prevalently address accessibility in a rather technical sense, without giving sufficient consideration to the cognitive aspects and issues related to the use of eLearning materials by learners with disabilities. In this paper we describe how a user-centered design process was applied to develop a method and set of guidelines for didactical experts to scaffold their creation of accessible eLearning content, based on a more sound approach to accessibility. The paper also discusses possible design solutions for tools supporting eLearning content authors in the adoption and application of the proposed approach.

Data Quality in e-Business Applications

In e-Business scenarios, an evaluation of the quality of exchanged data is essential for developing service-based applications and correctly performing cooperative activities. Data of low quality can spread all over the cooperative system, but at the same time, improvement can be based on comparing data, correcting them and disseminating high quality data. In this paper, an XML-based broker service for managing data quality in cooperative systems is presented, which selects the best available data from different services. Such a broker also supports data quality improvements based on feedbacks to source services.

Recourse for guiding didactical creators in the development of accessible e-learning material

Most of the existing efforts for supporting the preparation and delivery of accessible e-learning materials propose guidelines that prevalently ad-dress technical accessibility issues. However, little or no consideration is given to the didactical creators in the learning material preparation. The existing guidelines also usually provide generic indications on alternative forms of didactical content to enable equivalent access of the content. However, the sole provision of equivalent forms does not guarantee effective access. While this paper acknowledges the role of the existing guidelines, it proposes that the didactical domain creators be provided with a non-technical recourse that can enable them to contribute to or participate in the development process of accessible e-learning content aiming at guaranteeing an effective learning experience.

The design of an authoring interface to make elearning content accessible

This paper presents the rationale and design process of an authoring interface that enables didactic experts to create or modify eLearning content to make it accessible by learners with special needs. The tool has been designed according to a methodological framework and a set of guidelines for eLearning accessibility previously developed by our group. A key aspect of our framework consists in helping authors to preserve the didactic quality of the eLearning experiences provided to disabled learners (in particular, visually impaired ones) beyond assuring their mere physical access to online materials. A user-centred design process has been adopted to develop a usable prototype of the authoring interface, named aLearning, that we describe below.

Enabling Symbiotic Autonomy in Short-Term Interactions: A User Study

The presence of robots in everyday environments is increasing day by day, and their deployment spans over various applications: industrial and working scenarios, health care assistance in public areas or at home. However, robots are not yet comparable to humans in terms of capabilities; hence, in the so-called Symbiotic Autonomy, robots and humans help each other to complete tasks. Therefore, it is interesting to identify the factors that allow to maximize human-robot collaboration, which is a new point of view with respect to the HRI literature and very much leaning toward a social behavior. In this work, we analyze a subset of such variables as possible influencing factors of humans’ Collaboration Attitude in a Symbiotic Autonomy framework, namely: Proxemics setting, Activity Context, and Gender and Height as valuable features of the users. We performed a user study that takes place in everyday environments expressed as activity contexts, such as relaxing and working ones. A statistical analysis of the collected results shows a high dependence of the Collaboration Attitude in different Proxemics settings and Gender.