The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) will collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to make a model interactive multimedia physics Web site in development at the MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES) accessible to students who are blind or deaf. The Physics Interactive Video Tutor Project (PIVOT) is a multi-layered teaching and learning Web environment built around MIT Professor Walter Lewin's physics course which will be used by college and high school students across the nation studying introductory-level physics. It is expected to serve as a template for additional MIT interactive video-based Web sites. Building upon NCAM's ongoing research into Web and multimedia accessibility, this project - Access to PIVOT - will identify and address the needs of deaf and blind students in the design of the user interface, the navigation systems, and the presentation of video, text, illustrations, graphs, tables and equations. The Access to PIVOT Project will allow NCAM to work with CAES throughout the development of the Web site to test and interpret current Web access guidelines and techniques. NCAM will research solutions, build CAES' institutional capability to provide access solutions, document the implementation process, and develop and test a set of recommended practices for other developers. Documentation of practical issues include: needs assessment, decision criteria for selecting access solutions, range and interoperability of access tools and related training as well as production challenges. Testing and evaluation with blind and deaf users will gauge the effectiveness of results. Technical advisors will ensure that emerging tools and capabilities are integrated into the Project. Web-based-education advisors will provide input into recommended practices and assist in dissemination. Project results will: o Enable science-focused high school and college students who are blind, visually impaired, deaf or hard-of-hearing to participate in an innovative and challenging Web-based introductory physics curriculum. o Enable the MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services to institutionalize the technical capabilities developed through this project to apply access solutions to a range of future educational products. o Provide developers, publishers, and distributors of distance-learning and educational multimedia with recommended practices and an applied demonstration of access-design principles for network-delivered multimedia. Recommended practices developed from this high-profile, real-world production model will be widely evaluated and, ideally, emulated by other Web-based curriculum developers.
