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Teachers’ Domain: An Accessible Digital Library for Education
Bryan Gould and Trisha O’ConnellWGBH National Center for Accessible [email protected] 2010
Teachers’ Domain
Free, publicly available digital library of K-12 learning resources
473,000 registered users Teachers in 75% of
US K-12 schools Users in 188 countries, about
20% of registrations outside US
About 70K resource views per month, during school year
College Edition, Mass K-12 edition, NY K-12 edition
Captioned Videos Available Now
Most videos and audio clips in TD have captions
Users turn on captions about 20% of the time
Probably for computer labs with no speakers
Universal design!
teachersdomain.org
Access For All Pilot
Adding Access For All metadata and user preferences to Teachers’ Domain
Teachers can find resources that are accessible to their students
Captions or audio description are turned on automatically
The Access For All Approach
All of your materials can automatically adapt to the needs of every customer, student, or citizen you serve
A flexible approach to accessibility that benefits everyone you need to reach
Increases the usability of information while assisting with accessibility requirements
Incorporates personalization into the global web infrastructure, offering potential business opportunities for personalization
Disability in Info Delivery Context
Disability = Mismatch between user needs and materials offered
Not a personal trait but an artifact of relationship between the user and the delivery environment
Accessibility = The ability of the delivery environment to adjust to the needs of all users
Environment includes AT tools
Two Approaches to Meeting Accessibility Commitments
One compliant resource for everyone Rejection of valuable resources that are not compliant Time and expertise required of all resource creators “Accessible for everyone but optimal for no-one” Two resource versions and maintenance neglect Ignores diversity of people with disabilities
A transformable, flexible resource system Cumulative authoring Matching resources to user needs Resource re-aggregation Providing tools needed by each user
Serving…
Users with disabilities Users with diverse learning approaches Users with diverse hardware and software Users in disabling environments Users with diverse cultural or linguistic requirements Anyone who diverges from the hypothetical norm
Any context, including commerce, government, publishing, internal communications, training
You can avoid…
Stereotypes and assumptions of requirements
Labeling or classifying users in politically sensitive ways
Collecting irrelevant private information
Take advantage of ability to:
Transform the user interface of resources (display and control)
Re-aggregate learning resources Configure tools to meet user needs
Access For All Standard
A description of the user’s personal needs and preferences
A description of a digital resource
Can be used with or without other personal profiles and other resource metadata
Accessibility Standards Efforts
IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning ApplicationsIMS Access For All Specifications (Version 2 under development now)ISO JTC1 SC36 Standard 24751
http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibilityhttp://ncam.wgbh.org/salt http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=41521
Deployment = Instant Impact
Large user base means that new features will instantly be available to thousands of teachers
Launching this summer on teachersdomain.org
Demonstration
Participate in our research
Try out the pilot site Fill out our survey,
linked from the front page
Use it with your students as much as you like
Warning: some firewalls at schools cause trouble
Costs and Benefits of Access For All
Increased accessibility of content (but at non-trivial cost that scales linearly)
Increased efficiency for users looking for content (one-time investment in metadata, profile changes, and algorithms)
Small amounts of metadata yield big benefits (trivial but linear cost)
Increased promotion of accessible content that already exists (nearly free)
