Access For All

An international standard (ISO/IEC 24751) for describing user accessibility needs and preferences in a portable, application-independent format. Originally developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium for educational contexts, it was adopted as an ISO standard and uses XML notation to describe user requirements organised by display, control, and content sections. The standard explicitly adopts a functional approach (describing what the user needs) rather than a medical approach (describing the user's impairment). While influential in education and e-learning, the standard has been critiqued for conflating capability with preference, for its container-based model that requires duplication of settings across multiple contexts, and for making all adaptation decisions offline rather than enabling dynamic on-device adaptation.