Pedagogical And Accessibility Guidelines For Open Educational Resources Focused On Blind Students

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OER) are gaining an increasingly significant space, since they provide new forms of learning, make it possible to work with content in an interdisciplinary way and allow content to be improved and adapted. However, it is noted that, although OER can support the teaching-learning process and benefit all parts of the educational system, students with disabilities still encounter many accessibility problems. Thus, this work aims to present a set of pedagogical and accessibility guidelines for the construction of OER, with a focus on blind students. To develop these recommendations, a methodology was used that encompasses the following phases: exploratory, experimental, descriptive, correlation, selection, specification, validation and refinement. Therefore, the guidelines were created based on a bibliographic survey and responses to a questionnaire submitted to blind students, which made it possible to identify the main accessibility barriers and discover the difficulties they face. Then, the recommendations were then evaluated by accessibility and pedagogy experts and a new version of the guidelines was generated. Finally, these guidelines were evaluated by end users (blind students and pedagogues) through an empirical study. This evaluation was planned and significantly improved the initial version of the guidelines. The results showed a more complete, evolved and validated set of guidelines. Therefore, the guidelines meet both pedagogical and accessibility characteristics and are useful for the construction of accessible OER.