Most of the existing efforts for supporting the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible elearning applications propose guidelines that primarily address technical accessibility issues. Little, if any, consideration is given to the real actors involved in the learning experience, such as didactical experts and disabled learners. Moreover, implementing artifacts addressed to the e-learning world requires a wide range of particular skills which are related not only to technical but also to didactical, pedagogical, usability, and accessibility aspects of the produced material. This paper argues that the know-how of a number of stakeholders should be blended into a joint design activity, and that it should be possible to determine the role of each participant in the successive phases of the development lifecycle of e-learning applications. The paper sketches the methodological guidelines of a design framework based on involving the users with disabilities, as well as pedagogical experts, in the development process. The novelty of this proposal mainly stems from being built up around the core of strategies and choices specifically bound to accessibility requirements. Characteristic elements of learner-centered design are then further integrated into processes and methodologies which are typical of participatory and contextual design approaches. Following such guidelines, it will be possible to gain a deeper understanding of the requirements and of the operational context of people needing accessible material, either as learners or educators. The underlying objective is to increase the potential to realize learning systems that better meet different user needs and that provide a more satisfying learning experience. Moreover, when people get involved in the development process, they gain a sense of ownership of the system and are therefore more likely to accept and ''promote'' it.
There exist various efforts for supporting the preparation and delivery of accessible Web-based learning content (e.g., [3], [1], etc). Most of the efforts for supporting the preparation and deployment of accessible Web-based learning material propose guidelines that prevalently address technical accessibility issues. However, little or no consideration is given to the didactical experts, and thus their didactical experience, in the learning material development. Moreover, the aforementioned guidelines tend to provide high-level/generic indications of alternative forms of didactical content for equivalent access to the content. Nonetheless, the provision of equivalent forms alone does not guarantee the retention of desirable user interface aspects such as effectiveness and efficiency. While we do acknowledge the role of such guidelines, we also propose that the didactical experts be provided with a non-technical recourse that can enable them to contribute to the development process of accessible Web-based learning content. In particular, this work proposes tapping into the experience of the didactical experts by providing them with an avenue through which they can appropriately choose relevant and alternative didactical content toward developing and deploying accessible Web-based learning material.
Although expert-based evaluation techniques such as heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough are often inexpensive and quick to apply, they have not proved to be effective in capturing contextual factors that arise in real-world settings. It is no trivial issue to understand how such evaluation techniques could be modified or differently applied so as to better take into account context, without loosing the advantages inherent in those techniques. This paper explores a possible way of addressing the trade-off between application of cognitive walkthrough and low cost improvements of its contextual validity. In particular, we propose and investigate the benefits of supporting cognitive walkthrough with video data about user interaction with an eLearning course on mobile device. Initial results from this study indicated that video data provided evaluators with a more detailed understanding of user characteristics and interaction contexts, leading to an improvement of their assessments in terms of the total number of system's flaws detected. Video data was regarded by experts as both relevant and useful, especially for tuning the evaluation focus on types of difficulties they would normally not have experienced because of differences in terms of abilities, knowledge and background with those of the target user group.
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