One could argue that the only exclusionary factor in an educational context should be intellectual capacity, and that impairment, whether it is physical or sensory, should not undermine access. Specific issues that come to mind are the size of the videos, the speed at which they are shown and how best to incorporate language options. You could consider access for colour-blind people as well. The diversity of visual impairment will mean that while an increase in accessibility is certainly possible, a universal design may prove to be out of reach.

We had the real experience of having a blind students at our Computer Science Course, in UFPR, Curitiba, Brazil. I had the opportunity of acting as a mediator of the TRIAL to make things accessible for him, since we learnt he would be our students just a week before.

The main problem (almost unsolvable) was the appropriation of inherently visual concepts. Geometric and 3D solids concepts could be acquired by him by menas of a device that joinned Geoplane (a wooden base with equi-distant nails and elastic ribbons) with Macano (a pre-LEGO and pre-RASTI building toy based on metal battens with equi-distants holes on them that could be fitted together building 3D objects) capacities.

But we were shocked when getting consciousness of the high level in which we, sighted professor to sighted students, were (are) focused in referential visual expressions, such as "Look here!" "This is the correct solution". Because of this visual dependency of class presentations, our student, Lucas Radaelli (a professional now-a-days) seldom attended to the classes. This is a problem rather difficult to solve over a given presentation, since it involves the teacher's language used in the one-way "communication".

Dear Michael and Laura,

Thank you very much for your insights. I realize this is an extremely difficult issue. But we hope to at least diagnose the barriers video-lectures and video-players present for blind students, so future Lucas have equal opportunities as their peers.

Greetings from Ecuador :)

Sandra:

Hay algunos artículos de accesibilidad para sordos que presentamos en conferencias disponibles en mi área del Researchgate que talvez te interesen.

Estoy terminando un artículo sobre requisitos de aplicaciones de apoyo a la alfabetización de niños ciegos que presentaré en la conferencia HCI Internacional, que, si quieres, puedo enviarte con anticipación y tú citarlo. ([email protected])

Saludos desde el Brasil

Laura (Nacida en el Uruguay)

Hola Laura,

Muchas gracias. Con mucho gusto leeré tus trabajos ya publicados y si puedes compartirme tu nueva publicación te agredezco. De igual manera, en caso que te sea de utilidad, en sandrasanchez.blog.epn.edu puedes accesar a mis publicaciones, un poco más organizadas que en ResearchGate :)

Saludos,

Sandra

There are some players that cover different accessibility issues of videos (find enclosed to this message an example). Some relevant features of videos for people who are blind or visually impaired are: 1) the audio transcription or transcript that can be accessed by using a screen reader and 2) the audio description which provides information about what is happening on the video (actions, characters, and other elements that are not described in the main audio of the video). Find enclosed to this message other links about how MOOC platforms include accessibility features to videos.

http://handbook.floeproject.org/VideoContentAndLearning.html

http://edx.readthedocs.org/projects/edx-partner-course-staff/en/latest/accessibility/best_practices_course_content_dev.html#creating-accessible-media

https://www.coursera.org/about/translate

Dear Cecilia,

Thank you for your input. Audio transcriptions and descriptions are indeed very important. But how about features in the UI? What kind of video player controls are useful for students with different types of disabilities?

Hello Sandra ;)

I have used the floe video player and from my experience I think is a good option to describe the main features of accessibility controls for video players. Some useful features of video player controls and their main purposes in terms of accessibility are:

• Show/Hide captions: an option to show/hide captions for those who can not listen the main audio of the video.
• Show/HIde transcript: an option to show/hide transcript for those who can not listen the main audio or for those who use a screenreader in order to access the dialogs of the video.
• Enable/Disable audio description: an opbtion to enable/disable audio description for those who can not see what is happening on the background of the video.
• And those described in the section "Case Study: Floe Video Player" of the link enclosed.