Teachers’ Domain: An Accessible Digital Library for Education Bryan Gould and Trisha O’Connell WGBH National Center for Accessible Media AER 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 Applications  IMS Access For All Specifications (Version 2 under development now)  ISO JTC1 SC36 Standard m?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)

Questions?  Contact info:  Pilot site: