The Part 7 of MPEG-21, called Digital Item Adaptation, aims at an interoperable transparent access of multimedia contents in heterogeneous environments. This standard facilitates the development of Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) systems, which adapt the rich multimedia contents to provide user the best possible presentation under the constraints of various terminals and network connections. Content adaptation has two major aspects: one is modality conversion that converts content from one modality (e.g. video) to different modalities (e.g. image) the other is content scaling that changes the titrates (or qualities) of the contents without converting their modalities. At the output of adaptation process, the highly-subjective qualities of adapted contents nay vary widely with respect to point-of-views of different providers and different users. So, user should have some control on the adaptation process. In this paper, we describe two description tools of user characteristics, the presentation priority preference and the modality conversion preference, which allow user to have flexible choices on the qualities and modalities of output contents. We also present a systematic approach to integrate these user preferences into the adaptation process. These description tools are developed in the process of MPEG-21 standardization.