Adaptive, Inclusive Software Design for People with Vision and Hearing Impairments

Adaptive, inclusive software design is an area of research that aims to devise technologies and techniques to give equal access to educational materials and to assist all learners, regardless of impairment, in reaching there full educational potential within inclusive educational environments. An inclusive software design approach seeks to address the user interface and interaction needs of all learners with a specific focus on those who are vulnerable to marginalisation and exclusion. In educational environments inclusive software design is therefore concerned with providing appropriate responses to a broad spectrum of user interaction acquisition needs in formal and non-formal settings. When designing inclusive software technologies for students in educational environments it is necessary to tailor both the use interface and educational material so that the learning needs of different students can be addressed. Adaptive, user interaction research investigates techniques used to extend traditional user systems with features, which enable a user’s interaction to be personalized and content to be tailored on an individual basis. Such systems use information provided by, or captured from, learners to tailor the user interaction process. Through the application of this information, adaptive techniques can be used to support users in learning tasks by tailoring content and presentation, customizing user interfaces and providing additional guidance and support. Adaptive techniques have proved useful in learning tasks where users have differing learning requirements, disabilities, histories and preferences. At present the majority of software learning technologies assume students have no impairments. When these technologies are used in classrooms there is the risk that certain students maybe excluded from learning tasks due to their inability to access or use the software. Furthermore, students with vision or hearing impairments are often marginalized as they have to use different technologies within the same classroom to accomplish the same tasks as those without disabilities. This Panel will discuss the potential issues concerned with using adaptive, inclusive software design techniques to develop Software technologies for learners with impairments. Providing equality and parity in access to software-based educational materials in classroom environments where students have a range of impairments is therefore a serious challenge to designers of software is an important educational challenge.