Accessibility experiences in SMIL

This paper describes the lesson learned from different experiences of use of the SMIL language to create accessible multimedia presentations. These works were carried out by the students of the “Multimedia Systems” course of a Master curriculum in Computer Science. From the analysis of these projects it emerges that some types of applications, such as interactive stories and didactic modules, can take advantage from a SMIL representation, and may be made accessible through the different SMIL accessible features. There are applications, such as interactive games strongly based on graphics, that are really difficult to make accessible without radically changing the application itself.