Personalisation, interaction and navigation in rich multimedia documents for print-disabled users

Multimedia documents, such as textbooks, reference materials, and leisure materials, inherently use techniques that also can help make them accessible for people with disabilities who find it difficult or impossible to use printed materials. This includes individuals who are blind, partially sighted, deaf, hard of hearing, or dyslexic. The varying requirements of print-disabled users have led us to the notion of enriched media documents that contain redundant alternative representations of the same information. Unlike existing one-document-for-all approaches, we propose a personalization process that customizes these rich media documents to the needs of an individual reader. This paper describes, from an iterative user-centered design perspective, the development of a multimedia reading system for a variety of print-disabled user groups. We address issues of establishing user personalization profiles, as well as adapting and customizing content, interaction, and navigation. Customization of interaction and navigation leads to differences in the user interface, as well as different structural views of indexes. Customization of content includes insertion of a summary, synchronization of sign language video with highlighting of text, self-voicing capability, alternative support for screen readers, or reorganization of layout to accommodate large fonts. Finally, we consider whether this approach of addressing the specific needs of heterogeneous user groups provides a basis for a universal design approach for multimedia user interfaces.