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MultiAbile (http://www.multiabile.it) is an ongoing research project and an implementation effort devoted to the creation of a distance learning environment for the general public and impaired persons. A range of different channels and modalities are offered to allow the accessibility to heterogeneous contents. The most important modalities made available to access different contents are: improved accessibility for screen readers; dynamic transcoding to synthesized speech over the telephone; a dialogue-based navigation within the content; sound/tactile description of images (e.g. cartographic data) through force-feedback mice or pads; text simplification and restructuring for improved readability. The content is offered in two different textual versions, an original version and a re-processed version, in order to obtain high readability and understandability. The edited version is created in a way that only words from a basic dictionary are used (the Italian “Vocabolario di Base”), and the text is processed in order to obtain a high GULPEase index (an index of complexity related to the structure of texts). Users can describe their “profile” – whether they use a screen reader, or prefer to have a dialoguebased navigation, or if they prefer a simplified version of the text before confronting themselves with the original version. The user profile is used to dynamically adapt the content to the user, facilitating user access to it. The global platform and the proposed solutions have been specifically designed and tested for persons with visual impairments and dyslexia. The paper presents the general architecture of the MultiAbile platform, which enables transcoding of previously organized data in a specific XML format, and describes early usability results obtained with vocal transposition of the content and with the use of tactile information for the exploration of images. The paper also discuss how text rendition using a simplified lexicon and structure of the text could enhance the degree of success of synthesized speech to help people either with dyslexia or with visual impairements, overcoming their difficulties in reading text while learning, or making the access to contents faster and more flexible. Finally, the paper outlines future directions of the project in investigating how the multimodal approach of the MultiAbile platform could be further exploited to facilitate access to digital information in the Internet by leveraging semantic annotations in web sites.
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