The Convention on the rights of people with disabilities (UN, 2006) stated that participation in social life is a fundamental human right emphasizing the importance to rethink the concept of accessibility in cultural spaces. Cultural heritage sites, as well as museums and galleries, express an increasing interest in adopting strategies to improve accessibility and participation for all. We used an Inclusive Research paradigm, actively involving a group of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) with the goal to investigate participants’ perceptions and ideas of obstacles/facilitators to knowledge accessibility. A particular focus has been given to readability and comprehensibility of the existing textual resources in a cultural heritage site. The inclusion of people with ID as informants during the entire research process allowed not only to assess their point of view, but also to realize a questionnaire using the easy-to-read criteria. The main variables assessed through the questionnaire are: (a) Perception and Physical Interaction with content resources, (b) Language and symbols, (c) Content comprehension, (d) Engagement with knowledge. We argue that the proposed questionnaire may be useful to inform the process of creating and transforming learning environments adopting an audience-centered dialogue. Enhancing the contribution of special pedagogy in this innovative research field means improving our understanding of people’s needs and the complexity of potential outcomes, from an inclusive perspective.
This paper describes the process of co-design of technological products to increase museum accessibility and engagement in visitors with mild or moderate intellectual disabilities (IDs). By using an Inclusive Research approach, a multidisciplinary team of experts, including researchers in Users Experience (UX), psychology, and education, museum curators and a group of participants with IDs (n=9) have participated as the research team. Participants with IDs were involved in two rounds of interviews. The first-round interview aimed to explore participants’ use and familiarity with technologies and to understand their interest in using technological tools in different contexts. The second-round interview aimed at exploring participants’ spontaneous choice between different tools classified as low (easy-to-read vs Augmentative and Alternative Communication) or high-tech (Augmented Reality) aids for acquiring new knowledge within a museum space. The analysis of the interviews revealed that there was a general consistency between previous technology use/experience/interest and the choice of ICT-based products by participants with IDs. These results highlight the importance of emphasizing a multidisciplinary dialogue and the active participation of IDs users to outline methodologies, programs, procedures, and international standards to foster inclusive access to cultural heritage.
This paper is about the use of a widespread teaching tool: the slide presentation used in face-to-face, system-paced university lessons. It is produced by lecturers to support students’ comprehension during listening; nevertheless it poses elaboration requests to the audience which should be taken into consideration at the planning stage and in formulating its verbal content. The paper reports the results of a survey conducted with 163 University students who were asked to listen to a lecture accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation, prepared according to the most frequent formats. The written presentation had 3 degrees of concision/redundancy: it had a fully redundant with the oral message, partially redundant (main points in key words), or had a different linguistic form (paraphrase of the message). Furthermore, information in written text and spoken message could have had the same order or they could be scrambled. The results showed that, subjectively, students judged comprehensible every kind of presentation. However, learning tests demonstrated that paraphrasing negatively affected learning, while changes in the order of presentation did not, at least in the synthetic main point – key word presentations. The study suggested that the concise, only partially redundant, presentation is the one which leads to better results, both in the ordered and in the scrambled version.
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