Accessible e-learning material: a no-frills avenue for didactical experts

Different organizations adopt accessibility for various and often for diverse reasons. Interesting and inspiring as such reasons may be, it is important to ensure that the motivation for supporting accessibility is that it is the right thing to do, i.e. commitment to the provision of equal opportunities for accessing resources for people with special needs; the meeting of user needs. There exist various efforts for supporting the development of accessible elearning materials. However, most of such efforts propose guidelines that prevalently address technical accessibility issues (such as the format and navigation of learning materials) with little or no consideration for the didactical experts, and thus their didactical experience, in the learning material development. Moreover, the aforementioned guidelines tend to provide high-level/generic indications on alternative forms of didactical content for equivalent access of the content. Nonetheless, the sole provision of equivalent forms does not guarantee the retention of desirable user interface aspects (such as effectiveness and efficiency), and may therefore negatively impact learning effectiveness. While this paper acknowledges the role of such guidelines, it does propose that the didactical experts be provided with a non-technical recourse that can enable them to contribute to the development process of accessible elearning content. In particular, this work proposes tapping into the experience of the didactical experts, by providing them with an avenue through which they can appropriately contribute to the development and deployment of accessible e-learning material.