Performance of students with different accessibility needs and preferences in "Design for All" MOOCs.

Recent research has shown that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) create barriers for students with disabilities. Not taking into account their needs in the design, production or delivery of MOOCs may be one of the main causes behind this. It leads to poor compliance with suitable learning designs and web accessibility standards, as well as a lack of knowledge about the students' needs. The objective of our research is to analyze the learning performance of the students in MOOCs on topics related to Design for All, offered in an Open edX-based platform. Accessibility support was conceived from the outset, including compliance of both the platform and the learning resources with the WCAG 2.1 accessibility standard, and with a subset of the principles of Universal Design for Learning. Additionally, students were consulted on their accessibility needs and preferences, following publicly available modeling schemes and previous research. From a sample of 765 students, who completed at least one of the graded assessment activities of the course, a multilevel multiple logistic regression model was fitted. Based on that model, the results indicate that: a) users of screen readers and users of captions show a statistically significant positive association with a good performance when compared to students with no preferences, with an odds ratio of, respectively, OR = 13.482 and OR = 13.701; b) students who have low vision or very low vision show a significant negative association with a good performance when compared to users of screen readers and to users of captions, with OR = 26.817 and OR = 27.254, respectively.

Accessible mathematics videos for non-disabled students in primary education.

Our work applies Universal Design criteria for producing and using Mathematics videos for primary education students, at a time when many countries are shifting towards inclusive education policies. We have focused on how the accessibility criteria used for students with visual impairments might affect non-disabled students. For this, we reviewed applicable Universal Design principles as well as best practices in multimedia learning. We took into account the roles, procedures, tools and standards involved in the multimedia lifecycle. We then undertook an experiment consisting of producing two videos about prime numbers with the same pedagogical contents; one video was accessible for students with visual impairments and the other one was not accessible to them. We conducted a trial in real world school settings with 228 non-disabled children, who were randomly assigned a version, either accessible or not accessible, and were then asked to take a test to measure objective aspects of their learning concerning retention and transfer as well as several subjective aspects, including the attractiveness of the videos. Results indicate that there were no significant differences in the scores obtained by students using either video, although the group who watched the accessible video obtained higher score medians in the retention questions. Moreover, students found the accessible video significantly more attractive (p = 0.042). Our study provides recommendations for different stakeholders and stages within the process of producing multimedia mathematics materials that are accessible to primary students with visual impairments, as well as evidence demonstrating that everybody can benefit from the recommendations for developing good quality, accessible multimedia material.