1 Adaptable and Adaptive Information Provision for All Users, Including Disabled and Elderly People 1 Josef Fink, Alfred Kobsa GMD FIT – German National Research Center for Information Technology Human-Computer Interaction Research Division D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany Phone: +49 2241 14 {2729, 2315} Fax: +49 2241 14 {2065, 2167} E-mail: {josef.fink, alfred.kobsa}@gmd.de Andreas Nill USW, Schloss Gracht, D-50374 Erftstadt, Germany Phone: +49 2235 406 219 Fax: +49 2235 173 69 E-mail: nill@usw.de Abstract: Due to the tremendously increasing popularity of the World-Wide Web, hypermedia is going to be the leading online information medium for some years to come and will most likely become the standard gateway for citizens to the “information highway”. Already today, visitors of web sites are generally heterogeneous and have different needs, and this is likely to increase in the future. The aim of the AVANTI project is to cater hypermedia information to these individual needs by adapting the content and the presentation of web pages to each individual user. The special needs of elderly and disabled users are also partly considered. A model of the characteristics of user groups, individual users and usage environments, and a domain model are exploited in the adaptation process. One aim of this research is to verify that adaptation and user modeling techniques that were hitherto mostly used for catering interactive software systems to able-bodied users also prove useful for adaptation to users with special needs. Another original aspect is the development of a network-wide user modeling server that can concurrently accommodate the user modeling needs of several applications and several instances of an application within a distributed computing environment. Keywords: Adaptive hypermedia, individualization, personalization, adaptability, adaptivity, disabled users, user modeling, user model server 1 The research described here has been partly funded by the European Commission in the ACTS programme. We would like to thank the three anonymous NRMH reviewers for their valuable recommendations, and Gabi Nordbrock and Rüdiger Hüttenhain for their assistance in preparing this paper. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 4 (1998), 163-188