Rosa Navarrete, Sergio Luján-Mora. Accessibility considerations in learning objects and open educational resources. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI 2013), p. 521-530, Seville (Spain), November 18-20 2013. ISBN: 978-84-616-3847-5.
View paper in IATED Digital Library: Accessibility considerations in learning objects and open educational resources
The motivation for this paper resides in two societal phenomena. First, the rapid expansion in the use of technologies to support learning in formal education on universities and educational institutions, as well as in online environments that promote open and free learning. Second, the dynamic growth of educational resources that faculty and learners have globally released for use in open and free learning contexts, which allow interaction and collaboration between students and academic peers, giving rise to a new space that promotes equity opportunities in access to non-formal learning.
Moreover, there is an important recognition in a global scale about the rights of people with disabilities in all social spheres, and certainly the access to non-formal education is one of them.
In this paper we will conduct a preliminary evaluation over some of the most important websites of Open Educational Resources, in terms of the web accessibility to the web page and the educational resources themselves. The obtained results provide a starting point about the dissimilar levels of concern around the accessibility issues and try to identify the needed actions to ensure accessibility for and inclusion of persons with disabilities.
Keywords: Learning objects, LO, Open Educational Resources, OER, accessibility, web, disabled, handicapped.