Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo

Usability and accessibility evaluations along the eLearning cycle

In the paper we present how usability and accessibility requirements can be assured and validated in the whole life cycle of eLearning. On a 4-phase eLearning cycle, which includes adaptation features to cover the particular needs of each learner, we have included the evaluation of usability and accessibility requirements. We have performed this evaluation on an accessible standard-based open-source learning management system called dotLRN. The validation methodologies proposed are applied in three research projects, EU4ALL, ALPE and ADAPTAPlan.

The Challenge of Teaching to Create Accessible Learning Objects to Higher Education Lecturers

Abstract The EU wide regulations as well as the domestic regulations of many EU members ask to include accessibility lectures on architecture and engineering studies’ curricula. From our point of view, such requirement should be extended to include accessibility lectures at the studies of teaching, this way the teachers are able to develop accessible learning objects while are also able to lecture the creation of accessible web content so that Information Society is not an excluding society. Teaching how to apply the WCAG regulations is always challenging and that challenge becomes bigger when the student is one that has not the technical skills that are expected from any reader of the WCAG regulations. You will find in this article, the experience of Sidar Foundation and how we succeeded teaching that tough matter to mathematics, science or language teachers. We will discuss as well, the limitations that currently exists for the full autonomy of the teachers when creating or validating accessible-for-all contents.

Enhanced Affective Factors Management for HEI Students Dropout Prevention

Among the problems affecting Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Latin America and the Caribbean there is the dropout, which relates to a more general issue consisting in dealing with the diversity of students. Here provided solutions are to detect and deal with student’s particular capacities and needs. To cope with this situation the ACACIA project has defined a framework that develops both CADEP centers and technological infrastructure. The former consists of an organizational unit focus on Empowering, Innovating, Educating, Supporting, Monitoring and leveraging institutions in dealing with such diversity. The latter is based on building the required infrastructure to tackle those issues and covering both face-to-face and eLearning educational settings. This comprises non-intrusive affect detection methods along with ambient intelligent solutions, which provide context-aware affective feedback to each student. Preliminary experimentation results open interesting avenues to be further progressed thus taking advantage of current developments on affect computing technologies.

Iberoamerican Observatory of Web Accessibility

The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) were first published 15 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of progress in web accessibility, but much work is still needed to reach good levels of accessibility. It is therefore important to measure the degree of accessibility of current websites and the rate of improvement. There have been several studies on the implementation of web accessibility in Europe and the world, but such studies are unstable, with a methodology and sample that changes from year to year. The Iberoamerican Observatory presented in this paper aims to correct this situation, coordinating the work of the observatories of the different participating countries, so that all use the same methodology and a consistent sampling and data structure. Thus, results can be compared within the same country and with the other countries of the region.