Accessibility in Virtual Learning Environments from the Universal Design Perspective
The Brazilian Law for the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities guarantees the rights of access, inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in different spheres of society. However, to live in these spaces, real or virtual, persons with disabilities have to be designed in an inclusive perspective. In the educational context, considering virtual spaces, there are Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), in which there is a need to develop elements that allow autonomy in all forms of interaction and interactivity that the environment proposes. This work aims to elaborate, categorize and validate a set of accessibility criteria aiming at the universal design for the development and use of virtual learning environments. The method used for the development of the research is Design Science Research (DSR), as the research aims to develop artifacts that help to solve the problem of accessibility based on the concepts of universal design (UD) and universal design for learning (UDL) , when elaborating theoretical conjectures that must be validated, considering the scientific rigor, as well as the evaluation of the artifact itself, considering its design. Two artifacts containing design principles are created: (i) list of accessibility criteria aimed at universal design; and (ii) accessibility checklist, based on the list of criteria, for education professionals to design more inclusive courses. The design evaluation investigates whether the artifacts produced are valid and have potential for use, being carried out by specialists from the interdisciplinary areas that involve VLEs. The evaluation regarding scientific rigor, which seeks to certify whether the theoretical conjectures seem valid, starts from the evaluation of courses instantiated in the VLE Moodle based on the checklist aimed at education professionals, using test scenarios to cover the entire list of criteria intended for this purpose. public and compiling the results into a Moodle improvement project focused on inclusion.