Introduction

Education is a basic right and essential for both self-development and access to employment.  It is also the foundation of society.  However, many disabled people experience barriers to accessing education and consequently have fewer opportunities than non-disabled people.  This significantly disadvantages society as a whole as well as the particular disabled individuals.  

Approaches to overcoming these barriers include the use of technology, changes in attitudes and legislation.  The focus of this session will be ICT-based learning technologies to support inclusive education and the associated pedagogical issues which can act as barriers or enablers.  Co-design approaches involving disabled students and staff are important to ensure that the technologies developed meet real needs and do not add further barriers due to poor design.

Invitation for contributions

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

• Co-design with disabled students and staff
• Case studies of new technologies and good practice
• Critical evaluations of existing technologies
• Approaches to designing new technologies
• Accessibility, usability and support issues
• Design for all approaches
• Classification and evaluation
• Pedagogical issues
• International comparisons
• Accessible multi-media
• Mobile learning technologies
• Educational and other serious games
• Methods and tools to support inclusive education
• Design of accessible electronic materials and eBooks
• Voice interaction and personal assistants
• Robot interaction to support inclusive education
• Artificial Intelligence for education and learning

Chairs

Marion Hersh, University of Glasgow, Scotland, marion.hersh@glasgow.ac.uk

Barbara Leporini, University of Pisa & ISTI-CNR, Italy, barbara.leporini@unipi.it