A platform to support personalized training of people with disabilities

Abstract

Digital education has potential to provide different possibilities for personalization and consequently reach a larger and more diverse number of people. Personalization is a key component of solutions addressing important and long-standing pedagogical challenges in education, such as dealing with heterogeneity of learning styles. In particular scenarios where accessibility support is required, personalization depends on the creation of different representations for individual pieces of content. In this light, the main goal of this article is to describe how we addressed the challenges involved in the construction of a platform that satisfies this requirement. We thus present a system that supports the creation, adaptation, and delivery of personalized courses for people with multiple types of disabilities. More specifically, we introduce the technology, describe its main capabilities, and discuss the results of early evaluations by two instructors of an institution that provides vocational training for people with intellectual disabilities. Our initial results show that the tool was favorably assessed by the instructors and can potentially be adopted in this community.