DEVELOPMENT OF “CONTENT-FOCUSED ACCESSIBILITY” E-LEARNING MATERIAL FOR ENGLISH LEARNING TARGETING VISUALLY IMPAIRED UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Students with visual impairment use media conversion (e.g., enlarged characters and braille) and ICT environments (e.g., sounds and PC screen magnification) to learn English. However, there are very few English learning materials in braille, and magnification-capable and digital materials for higher education are not commercially available. Although many publishers produce online English learning materials, many do not allow screen magnification and text-to-speech function. Therefore, students with visual impairment need to create braille versions of and/or text data for such materials. However, satisfying such requests is time consuming, which may cause students to lose important opportunities or motivation A self-learning environment for students with visual impairment to study English has not been completely developed. The author found that, in many cases, only these "technical accessibility" of learning materials is insufficient for students with visual impairment to respond to questions depending on question patterns. Due to the absence of useable leaning materials, the English skills of many visually impaired students are surprisingly low. Nonetheless, university students require basic English skills. Hence, this study presents original attempts to modify the organization of questions for self-learning English grammar books. The author refers to this material as original e-learning "content-focused accessibility" material. The author's students with visual impairment studied this material and provided feedback from the following perspectives: 1) effectiveness of the material, 2) suggestions to improve the material, and 3) improvement of activeness for learning English after studying the material. Further, the author analyzed the students' grades before and after studying the material. The study revealed four interesting results: 1) Approximately 90% of the students with severe visual impairment found "content-focused accessibility" material very useful. 2) Those with severe visual impairment provided both positive feedback on and suggestions for improvement of the material. 3) Approximately 90% of the students with severe visual impairment significantly improved their automony for English learning after studying this material. 4) Finally, 80% of the students with severe visual impairment who studied this material improved their grades. Furthermore, 100% of them answered that their automomy improved after studying the material. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of "content-focused" accessibility material in the self-learning of students with severe visual impairment.