EducaPod: uma ferramenta de mobile-learning com tecnologia assistiva para pessoas com deficiência visual

Abstract

The current Brazilian legislative code aims to promote access for people with disabilities in higher education institutions. However, the full inclusion of these students is only guaranteed when the barriers between these and all forms of accessibility are overturned. Regarding to digital accessibility and the development of inclusive educational material, one area that has focused a lot of attention today is mobile-learning, because it adds the characteristics of mobility, portability, connectivity and ubiquity, making it an accessible technology for students with disabilities. This study chose to focus on the development of an object aimed at the visually impaired. It’s known that the written didactic material is predominant in the classroom and some distance courses focus on producing material in video lessons, which ends up being a challenge for this audience. In this way, it was decided to do the research directed to the use of educational podcasts. Reviews of the literature on podcast use in Brazil and internationally were conducted and the results were encouraging for the use of this format. Therefore, this research is composed of two parts, a theoretical-documentary survey regarding the bibliography and legislation on the proposed theme and also the development of the idealized tool to facilitate the learning of contents through podcast. Thus, this work describes the research that resulted in the development of EducaPod, an application for mobile devices, whose goal is to manage podcasts through voice control technology, which configures it in an assistive technology. This research also resulted in a tutorial for the elaboration of podcasts that will compose the application directory in order to encourage its use as a didactic tool. The application was evaluated and through the results of this evaluation it was possible to verify that the application has good acceptance as an inclusive tool and assistive technology and has potential as an object to facilitate learning for the visually impaired.