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 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 in mixed-groups. 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 further invites new challenges of how to best support technology adoption and its evaluation in often complex educational settings.

This website serves to present initiatives and resources for researchers working on this topic. It started from an initiative by Oussama Metatla, Anja Thieme, Stacy Branham, Emeline Brulé, Marcos Serrano, Cynthia Bennett, Shaun Kane, Christophe Jouffrais to organise a workshop on educational technologies for children with low or no visual abilities at CHI 2018. Given the interest this workshop generated, Emeline Brulé and Oussama Metatla fostered the organisation of a SIG on Evaluating educational technologies for and with disabled children at CHI 2019, joined by Ahmed Kharrufa, Katta Spiel and Charlotte Robinson. This culminated in a Full Paper at CHI 2020 reviewing quantitative empirical evaluations of technology for people with visual impairments, and further workshops at IDC 2020 and ICMI 2020 with a growing community of researchers and practitioners.

Contact us if you’d like to get involved!