A Boosting Approach to eContent Development for Learners with Special Needs

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.)