User-centered abstractions for adaptive hypermedia presentations

This paper describes document modelling constructs that support alternate content choices for generalized hypermedia presentations. While there has been much work done on adaptive hypermedia documents in the context of low-level quality-of-service adaptation, little attention has been paid to support of user-level adaptation of multimedia content. Taking examples from the domains of information accessibility for the visual/hearing impaired, multilingual information presentation, and content adaptation in distance learning, we show how simple interfaces to rich hypermedia documents can give decided benefits to the user community. We discuss our work in terms of experiments from the CWI CMIF project and indicate how these solutions have been integrated with the W3C SMIL language in the GRiNS editor and player for Web use.