Abstract:

Accessibility is defined as a necessary condition for the participation of people with different physical and functional limitations and as a guarantee of inclusive design. Given the problem of accessibility, the use of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in education has opened new possibilities for learning and access to information. Specifically, education in virtual learning environments is emerging as an alternative to favor and guarantee the integration of larger sectors of the population and facilitate their access to information and knowledge. This means that people with some type of disability can make use of the services available on the web in order to improve their training.

In our case, through a teaching innovation project, we are developing a virtual web environment for learning statistics, including that it is accessible for the blind (http://wdb.ugr.es/~bioestad). On the web, we are developing the statistics topics that are taught in most degrees through two different programs, SPSS and R. Within R software, we also specify the implementation through its two interfaces, RStudio and RCommander. Since R program is free, it has become the most accessible statistical software available today. Among its thousands of available packages, includes one, BrailleR, http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=BrailleR, which allows blind people to make better use of R.

Thanks to this website we can offer any person, including blind people, access to a large amount of information in which the basic statistics and inference are clearly and concisely explained. We are also developing solved and proposed exercises in which each step is explained to get a better understanding of the issues.

Keywords:

Accessibility, blind, statistics.