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resource. The first one presents textual access while
the adaptation presents auditory access to the same
educational content.
Original resources may have any number of
adaptations, which may be total or partial, i.e., or
they are adaptations of the whole educational
content or they are just a part of this.
Figure 2 shows the accessibility properties or
metadata of a resource and how they relate to each
other, as IMS AfA v3.0 specification presents them.
As seen in the figure, in order to simplify as much as
possible the data model, the metadata have been
organized in two clearly distinguished levels:
1 Those belonging to a basic core (core profile),
containing the most important metadata,
necessary for a proper description of the
resource.
2 Those belonging to the full specification, which
extent and complement the basic core
information.
3.2 Personal Needs and Preferences
(PNP)
The specification shows a common information
model to define and describe the student’s or user’s
PNPs with a different sensory perception mode or
who is in a disability context.
The recommended method to generate the
student’s PNPs is the presentation of a form with
various options (like aforementioned or preferred
sensory mode). The PNPs will be generated from
students’ responses to these questions.
The declaration of PNPs is associated to one
person. In turn one person can generate several sets
of PNPs for being used in the environment he/she is
at each moment (for example, in the dark or in a
noisy area). Like any software application, user’s
Figure 3: Personal Needs and Preferences (PNP)
properties.
PNPs should be easily modified by editing the user
profile and allowing its extension, replacement or
removal.
Figure 3 shows the user’s accessibility properties
and how they relate to each other. In the same
manner as AfA DRD specification, there are
properties belonging to the basic profile (Core
Profile) and those belonging to the full specification.
4 AfAPad TOOL
This section presents AfAPad tool, which has been
developed from the need to create accessible LOs
that allow an equal education without social
discrimination and in order to cover the existing
technological gap in the field of accessibility. This
tool has been developed by the authors at the
University of Alcala (Spain) in the field of project
ESVIAL (ESVIAL, 2013), funded by the ALFA III
program of the European Union. The objective of
the project is to improve the accessibility of virtual
higher education, through the creation and
implementation of methodologies to establish a
working model for compliance with accessibility
requirements and standards in the context of virtual
training, especially through web.
AfAPad allows the content authors and the
learning platform users to insert accessibility
metadata of LOs (DRDs) and students PNPs,
respectively, generating both XML format files. This
tool allows to complete the properties of DRDs and
PNPs graphically and to generate the corresponding
XML file following the IMS AfA v3.0 specification.
The tool shows all properties of DRDs and
PNPs. The properties belonging to the Core Profile
are highlighted in blue, and the other properties that
cover the full specification are highlighted in black.
The properties of IMS AfA may have two types of
cardinality, [0..N] or [0..1], and being defined for a
set of default values or having a free value. If a
property has a cardinality [0..N] and a set of default
values, the user has the possibility of choosing the
values from a dropdown list. Once the values are
selected, they will appear in a text field, separated by
commas and in the same order they were selected. If
the property has a cardinality [0..N] and a free value,
the user can write different values in a text field
separating each value with commas. Finally, if the
cardinality is [0..1] a dropdown list is shown, which
displays the metadata space values, where only one
value can be chosen.
AfAPad tool has been developed as a desktop
application in Java Swing and therefore it is portable
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