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Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2008
Requirements for building accessible web-based communities for people with functional diversity Olga C. Santos* and Jesús G. Boticario aDeNu Research Group Artificial Intelligence Department Computer Science School, UNED c/Juan del Rosal, 16. 28040 Madrid, Spain Fax: +34913988895 E-mail:
[email protected] E-mail:
[email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: In this article, we analyse the distinguishing features of web-based communities. In many situations the technology is still an access barrier for people with special needs. With the appropriate technological support, users with special needs may meet the social requirements which are traditionally considered success factors for web-based communities. To guarantee that democratic participation can be accessed by all community members, who have not been trained in usability and accessibility criteria, we propose: • to engage community members to guarantee contents accessibility by applying some contents accessibility guidelines • an open and flexible architecture that provides accessible services, namely EU4ALL architecture. We also express our concern that the social software developed under the new Web 2.0 philosophy does not fully follow the principles of universal design. Keywords: web-based communities; special needs; functional diversity; accessibility guidelines; universal design; open architecture; accessible services; social software. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Santos, O.C. and Boticario, J.G. (2008) ‘Requirements for building accessible web-based communities for people with functional diversity’, Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.52–65. Biographical notes: Olga C. Santos is the R&D Technical Manager of the aDeNu (Adaptive Dynamic online Educational systems based oN User modelling) Research Group at UNED. Her current research interest focuses on taking into account accessibility requirements to provide educational accessible user-centred e-learning services for learners with special needs. In this field she applies her experience on previous research works on adaptation, collaboration and personalisation based on combining user-modelling and machine-learning techniques in multiagent architectures and making a pervasive use of educational and technological standards. She has participated in several research projects (IP and IST among others) and published papers in various international conferences and journals. She is involved in the release of dotLRN versions, the open source e-learning system built on top of a toolkit for community-oriented web applications.
Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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Jesús G. Boticario is a Professor of several courses at UNED concerning artificial intelligence subjects at the Computer Science School and several open courses related to artificial intelligence and web-based educational systems. He has been invited as speaker at national and international conferences, forums and institutions. He has published more than 90 research articles. He is currently the head of the aDeNu Research Group in several national- and European-funded projects: FA2 (Accessible and Open Education, PGIDIT05SIN011E), adaptation based on machine learning, user modelling and planning for complex user-oriented tasks (AdaptaPlan, TIN2005-08945C06-00) and European Unified Approach for Accessible Lifelong Learning (EU4ALL, IST-034778). He is the coordinator of the ICT-Rectors Working Group on Accessibility Issues of the Higher Education Board of Rectors in Spain. He is on the Board of Directors of the dotLRN platform. He is the General Director of the Centre for Innovation and Technological Development at UNED.
1
Introduction
As with other web-based environments, virtual communities may become a new barrier for people with disabilities if the appropriate requirements are not taken into consideration when these communities are established. Under this concern, in this article we analyse the requirements traditionally considered success factors from the social point of view as well as those coming from the technological side and propose a concrete approach to overcome the main issues arising when building accessible web-based communities. In particular, in this section we analyse the distinctive features of web-based communities and their limitations to cope with the varied interaction needs of people with functional diversity. In the next sections we focus on the requirements from the social, contents and technological sides, and show the work in progress to build an architecture that considers semantic web technologies to provide open and accessible services for ‘all’. Later we analyse the implications of Web 2.0. Finally we outline the conclusions.
1.1 What are web-based communities? It can be said that web-based communities are online meeting places where groups of people do not physically meet but communicate their ideas and feelings on shared topics of interests using the collaborative services (or social software) offered by the web to regulate the activities of the participants. Many have tried to create a definition for the term. This idea of ‘delocalisation’, embedded in the term virtual communities, was taken to practice by the first communities that appeared around the bulletin board services prior to the web. In fact, the first reference in literature can be the subgroups within the notion of cyberspace as a global village (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). For Rheingold (2000), who created one of the first major internet communities, called ‘The Well’, these communities emerge when “enough people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) add that it must:
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O.C. Santos and J.G. Boticario “target some interest that will appeal to a sufficient number of people, allow members to form meaningful relationships with one another, provide some forms of entertainment and support transactions that allow members to purchase or exchange things.”
In turn, for Kim (2001), being online offers special opportunities and challenges that give web-based communities a unique flavour since “the Web erases boundaries created by time and distance and makes it much easier for people to maintain connections, deepen relationships, and meet like-minded souls that they would otherwise never have met”. To assure a high participation of the members, Wikipedia1 compiles four motivations that do not rely on altruistic behaviour on the part of the contributor: the first three were identified in Kollock (1999) and the last one in Smith (1992): 1
Anticipated reciprocity: A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that he/she will receive useful help and information in return.
2
Increased reputation: Individuals want recognition for their contributions and they will likely contribute if it is visible to the community. It also measures the trustworthiness of the members.
3
Sense of efficacy: Making regular and high-quality contributions to the group can help individuals believe that they have an impact on the group and can support their own self-image as an efficacious person.
4
Sense of community: It is motivating to many people to be responded to directly for their contributions.
Whenever people are aware of each other’s presence on the web, they are likely to consider themselves part of that community. Members’ participation is the key element and the collaborative tools are just the means to put members in contact when face-to-face communication is not possible. However, the communication tools play an important role for the success of the web-based communities, and may become an access barrier for people with disabilities. Moreover, the second generation of web-based services (called Web 2.0), which lets people collaborate and share information online in new ways, is causing a noteworthy change in the traditional web-based communities, to the extent that those communities that have synthesised Web 2.0 philosophy (such as Wikipedia, MyFlickr, MySpace, Facebook, Del.icio.us or SecondLife) are building the so-called Community 2.0. As Wikipedia states, Community 2.0 is a social phenomenon represented by rapid growth of multichannel social networks that leverage live meetings, webcasts and online interactions in order to create and share information, and it is characterised by rich user-generated content and dynamic interaction. Community 2.0 is mobile, ubiquitous and continuous (real-time) computing. Section 5 introduces the implications of Web 2.0 technologies with respect to a universal participation in virtual communities.
1.2 Web-based communities and members with functional diversity People with any sort of disability are excluded from web-based communities when the technology does not cope with the required functionalities to support their interaction. Although communication tools are not the core of a community (which is rather the
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participation of the members), if members cannot make use of the communications tools, no participation is possible. For people with functional diversity, the motivations to participate in online communities (Section 1.1) may be even stronger because of the social isolation that they may have. Furthermore, it is a fact that these users spend more time logged on and surfing the internet than nondisabled users and they report more positive feelings about their interactions. The internet has opened up a whole new world for them and has given them a sense of independence and freedom (Theofanos and Redish, 2003). Surprisingly, though, instead of strengthening their participation, usually the accessibility needs regarding contents and services are not considered. In this way, web-based communities do not usually guarantee the principles of equality of opportunities, accessibility and no discrimination for disabled people, the elderly, the temporally disabled, or those who under particular and external circumstances have varied interaction needs in their access to web technologies. Moreover, users’ participation and contributions imply end-users’ authoring, which means that the information and contents shared in the community are produced by people who do not have training in usability and accessibility criteria, mostly because they are not aware of the problem. Therefore, it is not sufficient to define guidelines for the authors of the contents (as may be the case for website designers or course authors); practical recipes and check-up tools for nontechnical users are needed, supported by architectures that provide accessible services.
2
Social considerations
From the social perspective, there are several requirements for the efficient distribution of knowledge through social interaction within a web-based community. These aim to enhance each member on the cognitive and social fields. According to Bouras et al. (2005), the minimal social requirements for a web-based community are: •
a common purpose or reason for the co-existence of the members
•
a common cultural context that includes values, beliefs, attitudes, behavioural norms and accumulated experiences
•
co-location by sharing a common space
•
voluntary participation both from the community (which chooses who participates) and members of the community (who choose to participate in it)
•
multiple, shifting and overlapping membership and participation.
To maximise these elements, they propose the strength and cohesiveness of the community by making explicit: •
a common history
•
a shared knowledge
•
common practices
•
common action
•
a shared vision of the future
•
a co-created future.
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Following the Group Theory (Sinclair et al., 2002), these authors have designed a platform that provides the members of the community with the ability to experience the knowledge offered through social interaction, by offering them resources of knowledge which are the components of the system and the contributions of the users, and places for interaction to retrieve the information and to communicate with other members. In turn, Etzioni (2000) has identified three general issues that users must meet to guarantee successful interaction in online communities: 1
reputation
2
trust
3
intimacy.
The last can be fostered by limiting the number of members and controlling the admission to the community. Moreover, from the experience in supporting online communities at UNED for seven years so far, three additional requirements have been detected: 4
users must have common objectives, activities or interests
5
users must be involved in the activities
6
there should be a behaviour and communication protocol (Boticario et al., 2003).
To take advantage of users’ motivation, provide efficient access to the information and guarantee successful interaction, the following social requirements are to be met by the members as their participation in the community evolves in time: •
a feeling of being part of the community
•
commitment to the values of the community
•
awareness of the other members
•
awareness of their active role in the community
•
use of the community communication protocol
•
voluntary participation
•
trust in the members’ input
•
reputation as a result of the members’ contributions
•
perception of contributing to community knowledge
•
interrelations among communities
•
affinity and intimacy
•
involvement in the evolution of the community.
These requirements can be considered success factors for web-based communities and are based on the following four principles, which support the usage of web-based communities (Santos and Boticario, 2006a):
Requirements for building accessible web-based communities •
persistence
•
shared information
•
interactivity
•
participation.
3
Technical versus content accessibility
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Most web-based communities were established without considering their members’ needs. However, there are examples, such as discussed in Santos and Boticario (2006a), in which online communities are built upon an accessible, collaborative platform which takes into account the potential users’ disabilities and addresses two objectives: 1
to allow different strategies for web access
2
to facilitate the integration of technical aids.
To remove accessibility barriers and guarantee access to all by providing an inclusive environment for active participation in the community, the guidelines defined by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) are considered. Arrizabalaga and Smithers (2005) propose that to improve website accessibility in general, it must be treated at its origin (i.e., ‘built-in’ approach): the design. In this sense, they have developed an accessibility validation tool for the iterative process of designing, editing, validating and correcting web content at design time, in which the WAI guidelines to validate can be manually configured. In turn, Flood and O’Reilly (2006) have defined some guidelines for website design for all users to be considered by nonprofessional designers. The latter approach is more appropriate in online communities, where a democratic participation (authoring) takes place, any member can contribute and it is not possible to define a restricted group of users who can be trained in design concepts such as accessibility and usability. Therefore, instead of theoretical guidelines and checklists such as those provided by the WAI, practical and easy-to-apply recipes are required. If they are easy to understand and to take into practice, they will be quickly assimilated by the community and integrated in the communication protocol. Moreover, from WAI guidelines, those technical guidelines which depend on the technology (and which can be automatically managed and validated) have to be distinguished from those which require manual (human) involvement. To clarify, let us use a simple example related to graphics. A vision-impaired person (or any user using a textual browser for whatever reason) cannot see the content of any image. Thus, the WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) prescribe the use of a special attribute in the image tag to describe the content of the image. And all that needs to be done in an automatic validation is to check whether the attribute has been defined and it is not empty. But what about the content? So far, text and image analysers are not so ‘clever’ as to check whether a textual description matches the image (and it is not likely to be achieved in the near future). The person who contributes the image should be responsible for providing a meaningful textual description.
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Precisely the latter requirement, which cannot be managed by technology, is the most easy to understand by nontechnical users and is more likely to be applied voluntarily by the members of the community because of the rise in their sense of efficacy (see Section 1.1). We have analysed WCAG 1.0 and selected those guidelines that, like in the example above, both require and easily obtain the motivated participation of the community members. Moreover, we have also taken into consideration the guidelines for accessible and usable websites defined by Theofanos and Redish (2003). Before providing the list, we would like to remark on our concern on the evolution of WCAG. Since the accessibility of the content itself cannot be validated automatically, the current draft for new WCAG (version 2.0) removes those guidelines related to the way the content is written (e.g., 12.3, 13.8 and 14.1 guidelines from version 1.0) to focus just on technical accessibility. In this sense, it is even more important to have guidelines for content accessibility to be used by nontechnical users to complement the technical guidelines for the platform architecture and the community design. Next, we provide a list of accessibility content guidelines that can be easily taken into account by nontechnical community members when contributing to the community. This list has been divided into three parts: 1
2
Structuring the contents: •
Make the structure clear and obvious.
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Use clear and simple language, straightforward sentences.
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Divide large blocs of information into key idea paragraphs.
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Make wide use of headings to structure the contents.
•
Include the main point at the beginning of headings, lists, paragraphs, etc.
•
Use bulleted lists to introduce statements.
•
Start links and headings with relevant words, and different from other links or headings.
•
Do not place relevant content far down or far left on the page.
•
Include anchor links to refer to content on the same page.
Terminology: •
Pay attention to how relevant words are pronounced by screen readers, and write them accordingly (e.g., home page instead of homepage).
•
Use standard names for standard services and sections.
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Make sure to explicitly write the keywords that users would look up in the contents.
•
Do not create images to introduce text.
•
Be consistent with the wording used in the text and in the textual descriptions of nontextual content.
•
Check the spelling of the words.
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Additional information about the contents: •
Include a real textual description for meaningful images.
•
For decorative images, write a space for the alternative and descriptive text.
•
Write useful descriptions for the links.
•
Identify when an acronym is used.
•
Identify the headings.
These guidelines focus on content accessibility and should be taken into account for producing real accessible content. As seen before, meeting just the accessibility guidelines defined by the WAI standards (or the national implementations such as the American Section 508, the UK SENDA, the Italian Stanca, or the German BITV) does not necessarily mean that the contents are accessible to all.
4
EU4ALL architecture to provide open and accessible services
In the previous sections we compiled some social requirements (traditionally considered success factors for web-based communities) to take advantage of users’ motivation, provide efficient access to the information and guarantee successful interaction, which can be met by users with disabilities with the appropriate technological support. We also specified some guidelines to help members of web-based communities share knowledge in an accessible way that can be managed by all of their members. Both social and contents requirements need to be supported by an architecture that provides accessible services. In turn, de Vries and Kommers (2004) have defined three requisites for the development of online communities: 1
integration of services to allow the users to interact with the system and the other community members via different channels
2
practicality of use since the usability of the system and the navigation facilities are essential to ensure the fulfilment of the platform objectives
3
personalisation of the look and feel and the contents provided, adapting to the preferences and competences of its members.
In this section, we will present the technical support and the evaluation process in EU4ALL.
4.1 Technical support for EU4ALL architecture An architecture that provides open and accessible services for people with functional diversity is being developed under the EU4ALL Project (IST-034778). The main goals of this project are to: •
design an open-service-oriented architecture for all
•
develop the software infrastructure for all services, including content, support and access
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•
provide technical specifications for all applications integrated with current and emerging standards
•
validate the results in large-scale settings (Santos and Boticario, 2006b).
The EU4ALL architecture is mainly focused on supporting the Life Long eLearning paradigm. Nevertheless, the objectives mentioned above are common to web-based communities. Some justifications are as follows: First, e-learning needs a strong collaborative support, and in fact, virtual learning communities are spontaneously created by students sharing a common interest, i.e., the learning of a particular subject. This means that, under this viewpoint, e-learning could be considered a particularisation of web-based communities. Second, both provide a better user experience if dynamic support to users is provided, which addresses their individual needs with respect to the user interface or the interaction with the services. Third, both have strong end-user authoring by untrained users, which requires the support of the technology to assure that the contributions are accessible. The EU4ALL architecture covers all the requirements discussed throughout the article, that is, for ‘all’ users, to: •
strengthen their motivation
•
guarantee an efficient access to the information
•
promote the interaction in the different and integrated services
•
offer a simple navigation and usable interface
•
personalise contents, interactions and look-and-feel to their needs.
In pursuing these goals, the architecture focuses on the following more concrete objectives: •
assist different types of users on the demand side (community members with functional diversity) and different existing roles on the supply side (administrators, specialised support people involved in the provision of services)
•
open, flexible and standard-based architecture to easily add new services
•
communication among services
•
smooth integration and service discovery to find the right service at the right moment
•
adaptive behaviour based on users’ interactions, promoting active participation in the collaborative services and adapting the interface to the users’ disabilities.
We are currently involved in the development of this architecture on top of the OpenACS framework, which is designed to build web-based scalable community-oriented applications. We have chosen this toolkit because it provides an integrated set of tools for communication, collaboration, contents storage, tracking, users’ management, etc., in two different workspaces, personal and community, and is designed to easily navigate within them. Communities are settled by grouping users with common interests and providing the required services. The enrolment policy on the community can be Open (which means that anybody interested can immediately join the community), Closed (which means that the community administrators select the people that can participate) or Needs approval
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(which means that people ask to join and have to wait for the community administrators’ decision). In turn, the available services are very diverse and it is the community administrators’ responsibility to select those services that better support the requirements of a particular community. Not only the services, but also the way they are displayed within the community space, can be easily and dynamically customised by the community administrators. Moreover, within the personal workspace, each user is provided with a compiled view of the different services available in the communities the user is enrolled in. For instance, in the personal workspace, all the forums from all the communities are shown together to the user, grouped by the communities they belong to. As in the community space, the personal workspace can be easily and dynamically customised, in this case by each user. On the other hand, the look and feel of this toolkit can be changed at two different levels, the CSS level (as a result of the OpenACS Zen project) and the theme level (which changes not only the style but the structure and display of the information). Currently there is a growing interest in the OpenACS community to increase user satisfaction through an improved user interface. EU4ALL adaptation is based on standards. Alternative responses can be provided to users based on the interaction between user profile data (part of the user model), which reflect a user’s needs and preferences in their interaction with the devices, and content metadata describing accessibility properties of a computer-mediated resource. For this, there is a wide support for educational standards (IMS Learning Design, IMS Question and Test Interoperability, IMS Content Packaging, IMS Metadata, SCORM) provided by the dotLRN learning management system, which is built on top of the OpenACS toolkit. These standards focus on contents, activities and educational design. Moreover, the OpenACS framework allows the integration of third-party developments in terms of web services via the existing SOAP interface. This allows the integration of external developments that cope with IMS AccessForAll specifications and the Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profile (Velasco et al., 2004) to model the devices used by the users. These features are essential to develop an open architecture of services which takes into account user needs and their context, which includes interaction devices. This standard-based approach fits in the semantic web field. The annotations made to contents, user interaction preferences and devices can be used to allow machines to acquire the semantic of the available web resources and automatically exchange and process the existing information. In this sense, the EU4ALL architecture also supports descriptive technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).
4.2 The evaluation process Two large-scale validations are being made in EU4ALL. One is taking place at UNED in collaboration with its Disability Support Unit, established to support the disabled users enrolled, which are about half of the total of disabled students at the Spanish university as a whole. Currently, the students are contacted by the responsible unit to offer them the opportunity to participate in the evaluation process. Moreover, we have created a virtual community both to: •
manage the evaluation process
•
provide a communication channel for the users interested in this area.
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This community is established on EU4ALL architecture. Thus, the improvements achieved from the project are automatically available on the community. This increases both the motivation to participate and the sustainability of the community, which was not achieved in the previous community established in aLF (Santos and Boticario, 2006a).
5
Implications of Web 2.0 and accessibility
It is undeniable that the web is changing. New services and interfaces are being developed. Users are giving value to the web by sharing and reusing it. The web is no longer only readable but also writeable. Web 2.0 is about participation. And the web is becoming the platform for many applications (O’Reilly, 2005). This new generation considers users as creators, and active members of the internet as a huge community. Therefore, it is based on the same principles as web-based communities and that is why these communities are quickly adopting the social software developed under the Web 2.0 approach, such as blogs, RSS feeds and wiki technologies. However, these new technologies are being developed without considering the principles of universal design and so far there has not been enough attention on the impact of such an evolution on ‘all’ users. This evolution focuses on improving the user experience, which is obviously good if it considers the user experience of ‘all’ users. It is based on the mixture of old technologies and new ideas in what has been called Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). Ajax speeds up the web by avoiding the need to manually reload the page. This significantly improves the user navigation (and therefore the usability) by reducing the number of clicks to complete a task. However, not ‘all’ users can enjoy this experience. We will not comment on the long-discussed issue regarding Javascript and Accessibility (Santos, 2006) since the concept of baseline in the new WCAG 2.0 intends to cope with this problem (whether people like this solution or not) or the recurrent problem of backward compatibility (what happens with people who use obsolete technology, e.g., browsers or assistive devices that cannot make use of the new features). A new issue to consider with Ajax is how users and assistive technologies are able to identify slight page changes done on the fly by Ajax. This continuous page alteration may confuse, for example: •
current screen readers’ users which have to read a page every time from the beginning in order to discover changes
•
partially sighted users who often do not have a complete page overview and navigate by scanning subparts of the page without really being aware of changes.
On the other hand, what gives dynamics to the Web 2.0 is the concept of ‘mashup’, which allows the building of new applications by combining existing services coming from different sources. All information for developers to integrate or extend the services is available in their corresponding Application Program Interface (API). This is an advantage over Web 1.0, since correcting the accessibility problems on the APIs (core) would reduce the accessibility barriers.
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Another worrying issue that limits equal access to information in Web 2.0 is the increasingly spreading usage of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (captchas), those distorted images with a succession of letters and/or numbers that users have to type in the keyboard when registering for a service. This kind of Turing test discriminates users from bots trying to spam the service in question. Nevertheless, they also discriminate humans who use assistive technologies to access the page, since the technology is the same for both bots and assistive devices. This was partly solved by the recent release of audio captchas, a solution that requires the usage of the appropriate audio plug-in (not a problem anymore according to WCAG 2.0, but still a practical problem) and which may also be recognised by bots in the near future. Although all these implications are being considered within the EU4ALL architecture described in the previous section, there are two additional issues of concern related to the usage of the OpenACS toolkit: 1
assuring that the redesign or build of new packages for this toolkit (such as forums and chat), done with AJAX technology by members of the OpenACS community, does not compromise the accessibility of the toolkit but effectively improves the user experience of ‘all’ users
2
achieving the appropriate accessibility level in OpenACS blog and wiki packages to allow real collaborative authoring of ‘all’ users by improving the authoring interface of these tools.
6
Conclusions
In this article we have analysed operational and technological requirements to build accessible web-based communities for people with functional diversity. In particular, we have analysed the requirements traditionally considered success factors from the social point of view, as well as those coming from the technological side, and propose a concrete approach to overcome the main issues arising when building accessible web-based communities. In this respect, it is a fact that being online erases time and distance boundaries, but in many situations the technology is still an access barrier for people with disabilities. The internet can open up a whole new world for people with functional diversity and give them a sense of independence and freedom. With the appropriate technological support and design guidelines, web-based communities can guarantee the principles of equality of opportunities, accessibility and no discrimination for disabled people, the elderly, the temporally disabled and those who under external circumstances have varied interaction needs. One of the main characteristics of a web-based community is the democratic participation of all its members. Therefore, the contents shared in the community are produced by people who have not been trained in usability and accessibility criteria. There exist guidelines for contents production according to accessibility principles. However, most guidelines are so technical that they cannot be applied by nontechnical users, which are precisely the typical users of virtual communities Moreover, the technical guidelines can be automatically validated by existing tools. In contrast, the contents accessibility relies on human contributions and cannot be automatically
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validated. Fortunately, they are also the easiest to understand by nontechnical users and the most likely to be voluntarily applied by the members of the community because of the rise in their sense of efficacy. To cope with these issues we propose the following approach: On the one hand, engage community members to guarantee contents accessibility by applying the corresponding guidelines defined in this article, which consider: •
the way the contents can be structured
•
the terminology
•
providing additional information about the contents to be managed by assistive technologies.
On the other hand, the technical requirements can be supported by an open and flexible architecture that provides accessible services and considers semantic web technologies, such as the EU4ALL architecture introduced in this article. Furthermore, considering their particular nature, web-based communities are very quickly assimilating the social software developed under the new Web 2.0 philosophy. Nevertheless, these new technologies are being developed without considering the principles of universal design and there is not enough attention given to the impact of such evolution on ‘all’ users. The EU4ALL architecture takes them into account and is working on providing accessibility support for ‘all’ in terms of a wide variety of services, including those required to build up accessible web-based communities.
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Santos, O.C. (2006) ‘Technology enhanced life long elearning’, Doctoral Consortium at the First European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’06). Santos, O.C. and Boticario, J.G. (2006a) ‘Building virtual (learning) communities to support people with special needs upon ALPE platform’, Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities, pp.312–316. Santos, O.C. and Boticario, J.G. (2006b) ‘European unified approach for accessible lifelong learning’, in A. Méndez-Vilas et al. (Eds.) Current Developments in Technology-Assisted Education, Vol. 2, pp.1102–1106. Sinclair, G., Cuttell, D., Vandeveer, R. and Menefee, M. (2002) Human Behavior in Organizations, 4th ed., Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing. Smith, M. (1992) ‘Voices from the WELL: the logic of the virtual commons’, Master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, UCLA. Theofanos, M.F. and Redish, J. (2003) ‘Bridging the gap: between accessibility and usability’, Interactions, November–December, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp.38–51. Velasco, C.A., Mohamad, Y., Gilman, A.S., Viorres, N., Vlachogiannis, E., Arnellos, A. and Darsenitas, J.S. (2004) ‘Universal access to information services – the need for user information and its relationship to device profiles’, Universal Access in the Information Society, March, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp.88–95.
Note 1
Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is an online encyclopaedia written collaboratively by people from all over the world and a prime example of a web-based community that gives contributors a sense of efficacy. Its editors, who voluntarily publish and revise articles, have formed an intricate and multifaceted community.
