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The authors expect that media and entertainment (M&E) providers will increasingly be challenged to offer consumers entertainment experiences that are more relevant, and therefore perceived as more valuable. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The paper looks at the authors' 2011 survey, which revealed four prominent types of “digital personalities” that are not age‐based, but instead are based on the combination of degree of access to content and intensity of content interaction.”

The paper finds that to move beyond merely distributing digital content, M&E providers should: think and act like business‐to‐consumer (B2C) companies, no matter where they sit in the industry value chain; target consumers' specific digital personalities; deliver holistic, relevant content experiences – not just content alone; and create new flexibly integrated, cross‐channel digital revenue models that can deliver value comparable to traditional models.

The fourth annual IBM Institute for Business Value digital consumer survey questioned over 3,800 consumers in six countries – China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA – to evaluate current and future digital content consumption behaviors.

Making digital content more social includes finding smarter ways to connect to customers, connect the ecosystem and refine content.

The paper provides useful information on making digital content more social and smarter ways to connect to customers, the ecosystem and to refine content.

Academic library web sites contain a vast amount of content, often contributed by a large number of content creators with varying levels of technical expertise. The Penn State University Libraries site contains almost 10,000 pages contributed by over 200 content creators from all areas of the Libraries.

In October 2011, in response to a complaint filed against Penn State by the National Federation of the Blind, the University Libraries agreed to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA within a year to ensure that the web site would be accessible to all Libraries’ users.

This chapter describes how the Libraries developed a remediation plan; engaged content authors in the Libraries’ accessibility effort; implemented new content roles and workflow to ensure web accessibility and how they continue to actively measure and maintain the accessibility of web site content.

This chapter will be useful to Libraries committed to making their web content accessible to all users.

This chapter discusses a bottom-up design strategy to support the principles of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning adapted for online course development. The concept of Universal Design demands a holistic, bottom-up instructional design model for online course development that integrates technology, accessibility, recent instructional and learning theories, and a participatory postmodern worldview. This study is intended for faculty, instructional designers, administrators, assistive technology staff, and Web multimedia software vendors associated with higher education. The research assists these target audiences to design and develop online courses that are accessible without special adaptation or modification. The components of Universal Design for online learning support newer emergent approaches to instructional design, various programming solutions used in the software engineering field for efficiency, Universal Design for Learning, and legal guidelines associated with accessibility.

The author takes a comprehensive look at the accessibility of e-resources for all people, including those with disabilities, in the context of collection development (CD).

Employing a combination of research methodologies — policy analysis, content analysis, and phone survey—the author explores the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered.

Several professional library organizations recommend accessibility-sensitive selection and procurement procedures. However, not all students enrolled in library school programs might learn about the issue. Few books on the subject cover the issue adequately. Nationwide, CD policies requiring conformance to accessibility standards are the exception; and when librarians meet to make decisions about the selection of specific e-resources, the needs of people with disabilities are rarely on their radar screens.

Researchers conducting similar surveys in the future might want to not only select a statistically more representative sample of academic libraries but also widen their focus and include both accessibility and usability in their investigations.

Textbook authors and course instructors in the area of CD need to address accessibility and usability. Librarians need to raise the issue with database and e-book vendors during license negotiations.

The acquisition of e-resources designed to be accessible and usable for all will enable people with disabilities to participate more fully in our information-driven society.

The data collected provide for a broad discussion of the extent to which the needs of people with disabilities are considered in connection with CD.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the parameters of the duty of reasonable adjustment to facilitate access to e‐learning resources.

Educational providers continue to develop new methods of delivering content in digital format, the increasing use of broadband, web‐based resources and new content creation software provides numerous methods of delivering excellence in content creation and delivery. It is important that this excellence is available to all; to this end the disability aspects of e‐learning provision are discussed in this paper, specifically relating to a anticipatory “duty of reasonable adjustment” to facilitate access to computer‐based learning resources within the UK education sector.

The paper concludes that the concept of reasonable adjustment is likely to remain unclear within the current statutory framework, is dynamic in relation to e‐learning software applications, and will continue to increase in scope and complexity as advanced software applications are used on a larger scale in the education sector.

After relating general accessibility approaches to the various open and proprietary source software applications and the concept of “lock in,” the paper argues that knowledge of reasonable adjustment is optimally considered in the early planning stage of development rather than after implementation, under the legislatively mandated anticipatory model. Further conclusions are presented which propose that the approaches described can be scaled up to provide general themes, which benefits the full spectrum of disability alongside the wider student cohort.

Further work is discussed and includes a potential UK extension of the analysis presented by Scroggins in 2007 concerning measurement and structural modeling of reasonableness under the provisions of the US Rehabilitation Act of 1998 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The purpose of this study is to examine factors affecting mobile phone users' attitude toward watching TV content on a mobile device. Under the uses and gratifications theory, the current study examined attitude toward watching TV content on a mobile phone, with antecedents of affinities for both watching TV content and a mobile phone use.

The current study adopted a construct of relative advantage as a mediator between affinities and attitude, and four moderators that affect the relationship between relative advantage and attitude. The study then analyzed 430 survey responses from public mobile phone users with a generalized linear model.

Research findings reveal that both affinities are significantly associated with the relative advantage of watching TV content on a mobile phone. Relative advantage plays a salient role in explaining attitudes toward watching TV content on a mobile phone. The relationship between attitude and relative advantage was significantly affected by relaxation, fashion status and accessibility.

This study contributes to media literature, especially where new, applied technology is considered. Particularly, the current research theoretically explains rationale behind a mobile phone user's positive attitude toward watching TV content on a mobile phone, and potential implication of the current and increasing trend of broadcasting individual content through social media outlets.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a library website model. Further, the paper discusses a designer’s checklist and an evaluative instrument that were constructed based on the proposed model.

The model was developed through a Delphi study that was participated by two panels of experts. The researcher communicated with the panel members via e-mail using two Delphi instruments designed out of two item pools that were developed based on the knowledge gained from surveying the literature, visiting the selected libraries and exploring the library websites. Then, a designer’s checklist and an evaluative instrument were derived from the proposed model through a series of brainstorming sessions.

The proposed model consisted of altogether 140 items (60 web content elements and 80 web design features). The designer’s checklist comprises all 140 items, and the evaluative instrument comprises 60 content elements and 57 design features.

This study has developed an academic library website model and derived two instruments based on the proposed model. Further studies are needed to customize, particularly, the web content pillar of this conceptual model, to meet the specific needs of different types of libraries including public libraries, special libraries, school libraries, etc.

The designer’s checklist and the evaluative instrument derived from the proposed model are useful tools for library professionals in designing, re-designing, maintaining and evaluating their library websites. The librarians may use these tools for both institutional and research purposes.

The model and the two instruments proposed by this study are unique in focus, origin, content and presentation.

The purpose of this study is to explore design issues hampering the accessibility of digital libraries (DLs) for first-time blind users.

A combination of questionnaire, pre-interview, think-aloud and post-interview methods was used to collect data on non-visual interaction experiences with American Memory Digital Collection (AMDC) from 15 blind participants. Qualitative analysis via open coding revealed recurring themes on design problems and consequent difficulties for blind users in accessing DLs.

It was found that AMDC is not blind-friendly. Five categories of design problems were identified. Participants faced difficulty perceiving, operating and understanding content and controls needed for information retrieval.

This paper does not offer a comprehensive set of design issues prevalent across DL design models, instead it focuses on design problems observed in a publicly available DL.

This paper raises awareness of design choices that can unintentionally bar blind information seekers from DL access, and further suggests solutions to reduce these design problems for blind users.

The paper’s originality is its identification of unique design problems that prevent blind users from effectively interacting with DLs.

A vast amount of literature has highlighted that accessibility is becoming crucial in evaluating e-procurement web site effectiveness. In this context, this paper shows some results of multidisciplinary research whose aim is to identify a model to evaluate e-procurement web site accessibility. The specific goal is to identify a group of web site attributes and characteristics that can be measured using quantitative indicators. For this purpose, a model based on a three-level hierarchical system has been introduced. The proposed model has been used to evaluate three Italian public e-procurement web sites. Finally, the conclusions and some indications on future developments of research are illustrated.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe research undertaken for the European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project. It aims to demonstrate how, using a task‐based approach, statistical measures can be applied to an initial assessment of a web site's accessibility, which could then be applied to further assessments to provide an evolving picture of the ongoing accessibility of a web site. Design/methodology/approach – Task‐based assessments were used to assess the accessibility of web sites, using quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings from this approach were mapped onto a probabilistic model, developed to assess the probability of an accessibility barrier relating to a specific feature or features of a web site. Findings – The paper finds that providing participants with a task instead of allowing them to randomly explore and evaluate a web site yielded more comparable results. For the EIAO project team, the benefit of the task‐based approach was that it allowed them to compare the user testing results with the results of the automated testing tool developed by the project. From the aggregation models included in the analysis, the most appropriate model and parameters were selected, and adjustments were made according to the comparison outcome. Research limitations/implications – Due to resource limitations and efficiency requirements, the assessments undertaken were limited to automatic evaluation, which could also be tested by the users. Therefore not all accessibility barriers in a web site could be identified. Despite this, it is felt that the outcome of the automatic analysis can be utilised as indicator for the overall accessibility of the web site. Originality/value – This paper provides a framework for web designers, commissioners, and policy makers to undertake a user focussed assessment of the accessibility of their web sites, which could be used in conjunction with other assessment methods.