Abstract
This article begins with an introduction to the digital accessibility as a human right followed by the presentation of the educational needs of deaf children and the challenge to fight the linguistic and cultural deprivation they are faced with. We present the project “Universal Design and Development of Accessible Digital Educational Material” and the steps and procedures for development and production of our open accessible digital educational materials for deaf students. We present the Digital Multimedia Library, the Online Dictionary, the multimedia accessible e-Books in detail within the bilingual context, the Curriculum-based Assessment instruments and the newly developed application for testing expressive sign language skills. The initial results from the implementation of these ongoing research and development project, suggest that our project is cohesive and successful pedagogical practice for accessible bilingual education and for learning of deaf children in Greece with great possibilities to be applied in any Signed Language of the world. We conclude that the use of interactive accessible digital material supports the documentation, development and use of GSL and provides deaf students a communicative tool that helps prevent linguistic and cultural deprivation.
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Credits, Acknowledgments
This work is co-financed: By Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) through the Operational Program “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020” in the context of the project “Universal Design and Development of Accessible Digital Educational Material” bearing the Acronym title “Prosvasimo” and code number MIS 5001313.
By the European Programme Erasmus+, KA2 – Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices, Strategic Partnerships for school education, in the context of the project “Teaching European Sign Languages as a First Language” bearing the Acronym title “Sign First” and code number 2016-1-EL01-KA201-023513. The State Scholarship Foundations (IKY) is the National Agency of the Erasmus+ Programme.
We like to thank Janey Greenwald and John Czubek for their valuable comments, suggestions and proof reading.
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Kourbetis, V., Karipi, S., Boukouras, K. (2020). Digital Accessibility in the Education of the Deaf in Greece. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Practice. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12189. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49108-6_8
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