Inclusive Education Technologies

Abstract

Technology has become central to many activities of learning, ranging from its use in classroom education to work training, mastering a new hobby, or acquiring new skills of living. While digitally-enhanced learning tools can provide valuable access to information and personalised support, people with specific accessibility needs, such as low or no vision, can often be excluded from their use. This requires technology developers to build more inclusive designs and to offer learning experiences that can be shared by people with mixed-visual abilities. There is also scope to integrate DIY approaches and provide specialised teachers with the ability to design their own low cost educational tools, adapted to pedagogical objectives and to the variety of visual and cognitive abilities of their students. For researchers, this invites new challenges of how to best support technology adoption and its evaluation in often complex educational settings. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in accessibility and education to share best practices and lessons learnt for technology in this space; and to jointly discuss and develop future directions for the next generation design of inclusive and effective education technologies.

Review of Quantitative Empirical Evaluations of Technology for People with Visual Impairments

“…Research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on assistive technologies for people with visual impairments (PVI) is an ever growing domain with the general goal of improving accessibility as a means for addressing broader societal issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. Research on technologies for PVI spans a variety of application areas, such as education, entertainment and mobility [12], and investigates the potential of novel interaction techniques, including tactile display (haptics and vibratory feedback) [73], auditory display (verbal and non-verbal feedback) [8,51,74], tangible interaction [26,18], and sensory substitution [47,31]. However, designing and conducting adequate quantitative empirical remains a challenge, an issue also noted in the field of education sciences [42].…”

"I Got Flagged for Supposed Bullying, Even Though It Was in Response to Someone Harassing Me About My Disability.": A Study of Blind TikTokers’ Content Moderation Experiences

“…Blind users' interactions with technology, especially the accessibility aspect, have always been an important topic for HCI researchers [28,57,61]. Blind users, according to research reports, frequently grapple with the challenges posed by inaccessible visual content displayed on technology devices [37,58]. Designers have responded to these challenges by developing technical solutions to enhance ICT accessibility [36,52,91].…”

Evaluating Technologies with and for Disabled Children

“…However, very few of the proposed technologies have been evaluated in the field, let alone over long periods of time, which greatly limits the impact of this research [3]. This was also one of the primary concerns of a group of scholars (including several of the authors of this proposal) working on technologies for and with visually impaired children 2 who met during a workshop at CHI 2018 [7]. 2 Some of the issues pertaining to evaluation were discussed in an Interactions column as well as online.…”