ProAccess

Improving accessibility of educational material for visually impaired people is the main pillar of ProAccess project. It aims at providing publishers and intermediaries in the elearning value chain (libraries, schools, charities and associations devoted to impaired people) with practical guidelines and instruments for the production and use of accessible content in a more effective way both from the productive process and copyright standpoint.

Objectives:

The primary goal of the ProAccess project is to improve accessibility of educational content in the eLearning value chain for visually impaired people. The project will disseminate the best practices and guidelines stemming from the results of two EU funded projects: ORMEE and EUAIN.

The main objectives of Pro Access are:

• to raise awareness in the educational publishing market on new legislation and new technological possibility to easily make accessible materials.
• to train and support content producers in renovating the current workflow with the aim to create, from the beginning of the production process digital structured content that can be easily converted in accessible materials for impaired people.
• to help players along the eLearning value chain solving legal and copyright issues with the adoption of licensing models and contracts to be signed between rights holders, intermediaries and final users.

In recent years specific sets of legislation, i.e. in UK Disability Discrimination Act ("Reasonable adjustment and Special Education Needs Discrimination Act") or the so called Legge Stanca in Italy are either stimulating or forcing content providers to accelerate the integration of disabled people, giving them the opportunity to access the educational materials in the different format needed to be used in efficient way. At European and national level it has been emerging major awareness and social responsibility amid educational content producers on the importance to provide accessible materials timely, allowing disabled people to get the same materials as their schoolmates and avoiding any social divide. As a matter of fact, impaired students still receive their course materials with a big delay compared with their schoolmates and this situation may cause them difficulties in regularly attending the school courses. Therefore, this is a topical issue which must be tackled as content producers encounter major difficulties specifically in managing the workflow involved in the preparation of the accessible versions of the schoolbook such as Braille, large fonts and digital version, being textbooks and other didactical materials (e.g. supplementary materials or digital content as Learning Objects) indeed one of the most complex kind of published material in terms of structure, graphic and layout.

Approach:

This main objective of the project will be achieved following these steps:

• By evaluating the current situation in the involved countries, the needs of the disabled people and the problems arising from their requests to the publishing sector will be analysed, involving in the process key schoolbook publishers and representatives of disabled people
• Starting from the results of the EUAIN project, the production process required to produce accessible documents will be defined
• By analyzing the content value chain in the education sector, a set of shared rules in managing rights will be set out starting from the conclusion of the ORMEE project
• Promoting results in the publishing industry and within intermediaries and disabled organisations will foster adoption of publishing workflow that consider accessibility from scratch and a correct management of copyright.

The main value added of the project is to be found in its collaborative approach as the proposal arises from the awareness that proactive rights management and collaboration between different stakeholders may be effective tools to improve accessibility and broadly to increase access to digital content.

Expected results:

• guidelines for publishers providing content providers with all the information needed to create fully accessible educational materials in standard formats easy to be used for producing different versions of materials devoted to different types of disabilities.

• guidelines for intermediaries (libraries, school libraries, teachers, voluntary and charity organisations) showing how to use these materials in a correct way with respect to copyright issues
• licensing schema allowing content producers to provide special formatted digital materials for disabled people and manage the relations between them, intermediaries and/or final users
• training modules for educational content providers aimed at providing them with all the information needed to facilitate the adoption of the production procedure for processing accessible content and the licensing schema defined in the project itself

Pro Access is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the eLearning programme.