Accessibility in virtual knowledge spaces for mathematics and natural sciences

Flexibility and adaptivity are two of the outstanding characteristics of new media and new technologies in learning, teaching and research. These properties allow new methods to support persons with special needs and handicaps. So far the existing approaches have been able to expand the accessibility to static Web-based information. However, the development of "barrier-free" eLearning and eResearch environments is still a barely investigated field due to the lack of concepts to support accessibility of interactive components and to transform between different media types. In this paper we discuss the resulting barriers, and some approaches which have the ability to at least contribute to overcome these problems focusing on eLTR-environments (eLTR := eLearning, eTeaching, eResearch) for mathematics and natural sciences.