Abstract:

In the educational field, the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has increased notably in recent years. This fact has been highlighted since 2020 in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced educational institutions to virtualize their academic activities. MOOCs are a tool that provide the opportunity for millions of people who have access to the internet to join in synchronous or asynchronous teaching-learning processes. One of the most important features of these courses is the wide use of videos, which allow to improve the experiences of the users. For the fulfillment of this purpose, the videos must include accessibility characteristics in their design, development and publication. However, nowadays videos present serious accessibility problems for people with disabilities and older adults. The accessibility evaluation of videos is a complex task and requires significant time. In the research presented in this work, experts in web accessibility take on this challenge and evaluated a set of basic, medium and advanced level success criteria recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The success criteria evaluated consider aspects of perception and understanding of the videos. This work presents as a case study the results of the evaluation of the accessibility of all the videos included in the MOOCs offered by a higher education institution in Ecuador in 2020. This study applied a modification of a method proposed by the authors of this research in a previous study considering the success criteria recommended by WCAG 2.1. The results showed the non-fulfillment of A, AA and AAA level success criteria, such as: captions, captions in different languages, audio description or media alternative, textual transcription, textual transcription in different languages, textual description, sign languages, extended audio description. These results demonstrate that there is still a lot to eliminate both discrimination and the violation of the right to education of people with disabilities.

Keywords:

Accessibility, education, e-learning, massive open online courses, MOOCs, videos, web content accessibility guidelines 2.1, WCAG 2.1, world wide web consortium.