Towards improving the e-learning experience for deaf students: e-LUX

TL;DR

This paper addresses the digital divide faced by deaf students in e-learning by proposing solutions that enhance accessibility through sign language support, focusing on content tailoring in their native sign language.

Contribution

It introduces preliminary solutions to improve e-learning accessibility for deaf students by integrating sign language considerations into content and service design.

Findings

Proposed tailored activities for sign language users.

Enhanced accessibility features for deaf students.

Framework for integrating sign language into e-learning platforms.

Abstract

Deaf people are more heavily affected by the digital divide than many would expect. Moreover, most accessibility guidelines addressing their needs just deal with captioning and audio-content transcription. However, this approach to the problem does not consider that deaf people have big troubles with vocal languages, even in their written form. At present, only a few organizations, like W3C, produced guidelines dealing with one of their most distinctive expressions: Sign Language (SL). SL is, in fact, the visual-gestural language used by many deaf people to communicate with each other. The present work aims at supporting e-learning user experience (e-LUX) for these specific users by enhancing the accessibility of content and container services. In particular, we propose preliminary solutions to tailor activities which can be more fruitful when performed in one's own "native" language, which for most deaf people, especially younger ones, is represented by national SL.