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Of late there has been a growing interest and effort toward meeting the requirements of persons with special needs. However, most of the accessibility standards and guidelines that have been proposed have been developed by adopting a domain independent and often "technical" perspective. Such proposals are therefore often not sufficient to achieve accessibility goals in specific application areas such as eLearning. This paper presents a boosting approach/framework toward the development of more effective and usable accessibility indications for authors of didactic content, which are currently being fed and tested within the Italian context of the VICE project. This approach is intended to take into account the aforementioned issue and to make a step forward with respect to existing accessibility proposals and approaches in the eLearning domain. In particular, we discuss our design method for increasing the quality of eLearning materials for learners with special needs and an authoring tool, "aLearning", to support eLearning content authors in their development of didactic material matching those needs. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

The article presents two multimedia system installations that were designed to provide information to museum and exhibit visitors through natural-interaction interfaces. The Media Integration and Communication Center at the University of Florence used natural-interaction, computer vision systems for both the Point At system in the Museum of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, Italy and the Interactive Blackboard system at the New City Exhibition of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The ultimate goal of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi was to use information technology to make teaching attractive and effective. The Point At system's goal is to stimulate the visitors to interact with a digital version of the fresco "The Journey of the Magi," by Benozzo Gozzoli and, at the same time, make them interact in the same way they will in the chapel, reinforcing their real experience with the fresco. The Interactive Blackboard at the Palazzo Vecchio consisted of a large rear-projected screen which displayed a colorful three-dimensional map of Florence. INSET: Editor's Note.

This contribution is the preface of the volume of post-proceedings of the 10 th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, IRCDL 2014. The volume contains the reports on the invited presentations and the accepted papers. The accepted papers were initially reviewed for presentation at the conference, and after the presentation the papers were resubmitted by the authors in a revised version that included the suggestions received during the presentation at the conference. The resubmitted versions of the papers were reviewed by at least three anonymous reviewers and the accepted papers were revised by the authors taking into considerations the reviewers’ suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]