How to interweave accessibility with didactic and technological quality of digital educational materials

Abstract

Accessibility is a quality requirement for digital educational materials (or contents) in interactive learning environments. It ensures that students with disabilities do not face barriers when using such content. However, guaranteeing the accessibility of these materials is no easy task, at least for a significant part of the producers, evaluators, and users of educational materials, such as teachers. Proof of this can be found in the results of the case studies on the usability and reliability of technological accessibility evaluation standards conducted by Spanish Association for Standardisation (UNE) during the development of the Spanish Standard for the Quality of Digital Educational Materials UNE 71362. The results obtained show the difficulty of ensuring a good level of accessibility to digital educational materials, concluding that most creators and evaluators did not apply the guidelines due to either ignorance or difficulties. In order to minimise this problem, a new research approach has been taken based on unifying and abstracting the technology accessibility indicators from the regulations in force and integrating them, according to their applicability, transversally in the teaching and technological criteria of the new standard. This paper presents, explains and justifies this new approach in which the accessibility criteria are not isolated.