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Accessibility and Personalization in OpenCourseWare : An Inclusive Development Approach
2020, Elias, Mirette, Ruckhaus, Edna, Draffan, E.A., James, Abi, Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen, Lohmann, Steffen, Khiat, Abderrahmane, Auer, Sören, Chang, Maiga, Sampson, Demetrios G., Huang, Ronghuai, Hooshyar, Danial, Chen, Nian-Shing, Kinshuk, Pedaste, Margus
OpenCourseWare (OCW) has become a desirable source for sharing free educational resources which means there will always be users with differing needs. It is therefore the responsibility of OCW platform developers to consider accessibility as one of their prioritized requirements to ensure ease of use for all, including those with disabilities. However, the main challenge when creating an accessible platform is the ability to address all the different types of barriers that might affect those with a wide range of physical, sensory and cognitive impairments. This article discusses accessibility and personalization strategies and their realisation in the SlideWiki platform, in order to facilitate the development of accessible OCW. Previously, accessibility was seen as a complementary feature that can be tackled in the implementation phase. However, a meaningful integration of accessibility features requires thoughtful consideration during all project phases with active involvement of related stakeholders. The evaluation results and lessons learned from the SlideWiki development process have the potential to assist in the development of other systems that aim for an inclusive approach. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Ontology-Based Representation for Accessible OpenCourseWare Systems
2018-11-29, Elias, Mirette, Lohmann, Steffen, Auer, Sören
OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems have been established to provide open educational resources that are accessible by anyone, including learners with special accessibility needs and preferences. We need to find a formal and interoperable way to describe these preferences in order to use them in OCW systems and retrieve relevant educational resources. This formal representation should use standard accessibility definitions of OCW that can be reused by other OCW systems to represent accessibility concepts. In this article, we present an ontology to represent the accessibility needs of learners with respect to the IMS AfA specifications. The ontology definitions together with rule-based queries are used to retrieve relevant educational resources. Related to this, we developed a user interface component that enables users to create accessibility profiles representing their individual needs and preferences based on our ontology. We evaluated the approach with five examples profiles.
Demonstration of a customizable knowledge graph visualization framework
2020, Wiens, Vitali, Lohmann, Steffen, Taylor, Kerry, Gonçalves, Rafael, Lecue, Freddy, Yan, Jun
In the context of the Semantic Web, various visualization methods and tools exist. However, suitable visualizations are highly de-pendent on individual use cases and targeted user groups. Therefore, existing solutions require modifications and adjustments to meet the de-mands of other use cases and user groups. In this demo, we present an approach for a unified framework addressing customizable visual rep-resentations of knowledge graphs. Our approach refines the commonly used steps in the visualization generation process (i.e., data access, map-ping to visual primitives, and rendering) for Semantic Web contexts. Separation of concerns for individual steps and a modular and customiz-able architecture build the foundation for a pipeline-based visualization framework. The framework enables the creation and selection of the right components for the right tasks, realizing a variety of use cases and visual representations in Semantic Web contexts.