Assistive Technology Applied in an Inclusive MOOC for the Blind

Considering the opportunity provided by Massive and Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to reach wide audiences, a new pedagogical model of the MOOC in Educational Technologies was implemented at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) aiming at maximizing the MOOCs’ potential to provide educational offers to both deaf and blind communities. These communities face several and distinctive communication barriers, not allowing them to integrate within the larger intellectual communities as most tools used for information dissemination remain inaccessible to them. This paper’s main purpose is to present the innovative pedagogical model devised at ISEP/GILT to better enable the blind/visually impaired individuals to access digital educational content, hence being a contribution for the inclusion of these individuals in educational environments. This inclusive and innovating pedagogical model is a result of the wider research being conducted at ISEP/GILT concerning the development of assistive technology targeted at improving communication with and between the blind and the deaf, consequently fostering their inclusion. Although this paper highlights the pedagogical model proposal targeted at the blind/visually impaired, the model also integrates the deaf. Therefore, we present the complete API (BDC-API) architecture that supports the inclusive pedagogical model. This API translates digital educational content for the blind, grounded on the developed model used to translate written-text into sign language for the deaf.