Adapting learning environments with AccessForAll
Greg Gay, Silvia Mirri, Marco Roccetti, Paola Salomoni · 2009 · Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A) · doi:10.1145/1535654.1535676
Summary
This paper describes the first implementation of the ISO FDIS 24751 accessibility standards (and the closely related IMS AccessForAll specifications) in ATutor, an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) developed at the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Centre with accessibility as a founding principle. The AccessForAll approach represents a fundamentally different paradigm from WCAG-style web accessibility: rather than making a single version of content conform to guidelines, it enables learning environments to automatically adapt content presentation to match individual learners' needs and preferences. The implementation involved three areas of development. First, Personal Needs and Preferences (PNP) — a preference system across four tabs (Display, Content, Tools, Controls) allowing learners to specify their display appearance, preferred content modalities, scaffolding tools, and navigation controls. These preferences are stored in user sessions and rendered through conditional template logic and dynamically generated CSS overrides. Second, Digital Resource Descriptions (DRD) — an authoring tool enabling content creators to define the modality of original resources (visual, textual, auditory, or combinations) and associate alternative resources of different modalities as adaptations. When a learner accesses content, the system automatically delivers the version matching their preferences. Third, Content Packaging interoperability — extending IMS Content Packaging to support import and export of adapted content, enabling sharing of AccessForAll materials between courses and institutions.
Key findings
The implementation revealed important gaps in the AccessForAll standards themselves. First, the standard did not provide a clear mechanism for learners to choose whether adapted content should supplement or replace the original — a critical distinction (e.g., a blind learner might want audio descriptions alongside video, or might want an audio-only replacement). The ATutor team added their own preference setting to address this. Second, the standards were not well-suited to adapting text content for users with print disabilities — a significant oversight given the prevalence of text in e-learning. Full-page text alternatives conflicted with individual resource-level adaptations when both existed for the same modality, revealing that adapting content at different levels of granularity (individual resources vs. whole pages) introduces considerable complexity. The project produced the first relatively complete open-source functional implementation of ISO 24751 and IMS AccessForAll, released in ATutor 1.6.2 and freely available for developers to study and extend. The work was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and represented a collaboration between the University of Toronto's ATRC and the University of Bologna.
Relevance
This paper documents a landmark implementation in the history of accessible e-learning. The AccessForAll framework represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to move beyond the "one accessible version for all" approach toward genuinely personalized accessibility. Rather than treating accessibility as a binary property (accessible or not), it models it as a matching problem between learner needs and content capabilities — an idea that has influenced modern personalization and adaptive learning systems. For practitioners in educational technology, the three-part architecture (learner preferences, resource descriptions, content packaging) provides a reference model for building adaptive accessible systems. The implementation's lessons about supplementing vs. replacing content, and the challenge of multi-granularity adaptation, remain relevant design considerations for any system that attempts content personalization for accessibility. ATutor itself was historically significant as one of the first LMS platforms designed with accessibility as a core principle rather than a retrofit, and this work extended that leadership into standards-based adaptive accessibility. The ISO 24751 standard that ATutor implemented has influenced subsequent work on accessible digital publishing, including aspects of the EPUB accessibility specification.
Tags: e-learning accessibility · learning management systems · content adaptation · personalization · ISO 24751 · IMS AccessForAll · open source · ATutor · inclusive education
Standards referenced: ISO FDIS 24751 · IMS AccessForAll · IMS Content Packaging