Rosa Navarrete, Sergio Luján-Mora. Proceedings of the 9th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2015), p. 6402-6412, Madrid (Spain), March 2-4 2015. ISBN: 978-84-606-5763-7. ISSN: 2340-1079.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are digital contents with educational purpose available through websites that can be freely reused by educators and self-learners. There is a growing trend in using OER to improve quality in teaching and learning processes, and the importance of OER is recognized in government initiatives and international instances such as UNESCO in the 2012 World Open Educational Resource Congress. However, people with disabilities usually face access barriers when using these resources. The causes of access barriers are two-fold: OER can be no accessible or websites can have accessibility issues in their design. In previous works, we conducted accessibility evaluation in OER websites through automated tools as a preliminary and quick way of evaluation, but with some drawbacks related to the reliability of results. The aim of this research is to complement the evaluation of web accessibility in OER websites, using a heuristic method based on “Barrier Walkthrough”, proposed by Giorgio Brajnik, a web accessibility researcher. This method considers the context of use of the website for persons with specific disabilities, and tests the potential barriers for achieving goals. The results presented in this paper contribute to validate the method and offer another perspective of web accessibility evaluation of OER websites based on specific disabilities. Additionally, this work is part of a method for evaluating the quality of OER and the websites where these are published.
Keywords: open educational resources, oer, web accessibility, heuristic method, disabilities
More information: Evaluating accessibility of Open Educational Resources websites with a heuristic method