E-Learning

Web-based courses provide enhanced educational opportunities for people with disabilities who—because of factors such as climate, health issues, or inaccessible buildings, locations, or classrooms—experience barriers to attending classroom-based courses. However, the e-learning technologies that can reduce or remove many barriers encountered by people with disabilities can also create new barriers, particularly for people who require assistive or adaptive technology to use computers. For example, video and audio clips can be helpful to people with reading disabilities, but are inaccessible to people who are deaf or have visual impairments unless the video and audio content is presented in other formats (e.g. text).

Our research is examining:

• how e-learning activities in Canadian universities and colleges are creating new learning opportunities for people with disabilities
• how the new obstacles that e-learning technologies create for people with disabilities may be eliminated

We encourage you to use the links on the left side navigation bar for more information about Dis-IT E-Learning projects, researchers, partner organizations, products, and resources.