Abstract:

Digital Humanities is an area of theoretical-practical studies committed to a perspective and an interdisciplinary methodology, informatics and humanistic, in the analysis of some social phenomena and problems. It is a discipline that has recently found space in the field of university education. Its teaching is of great interest because its objective is to offer knowledge to interpret the relevant social changes introduced by the new technologies. Naturally, the study of the social impact of technology can be carried out from different points of view. Today we think that some of the essential criteria for this type of analysis have to be the accessibility and usability of the new digital tools. For these reasons, we decided to prepare a seminar to discuss with the students, who attended, in their final year of their studies, this innovative university course (digital humanities), on the issue of accessibility, in general, and the usability, in particular, of mobile applications dedicated to people with disabilities and various diseases. Specifically, we have considered an application aimed at people with multiple sclerosis, used in different countries but outside the students, and we have worked on the usability of this application.

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Objectives:
Teach a group of digital humanities students the importance of usability and the role it plays in the social changes introduced by the new technologies.

Methodology:
It was focus group discussion where students were gather together in discussion groups. To ensure that the group does not depart from the subject of study, in each group a moderator was chosen to ask questions and lead the discussion. The process that conduct the usability study was divided into three stages. First, contact with the app and understand how the app works. Second, assignment of a set of tasks to check usability. Third, perform a usability test that is a new tool for assessing the quality of mobile applications dedicated to the health. Additionally to the above three stages of the seminar, we ask to the students for their interest and expectations in the seminar, before and after

The results extracted at the end of the seminar showed that the seminar has been useful for students and they have learned about usability. They think it is important and would like to learn more. In general, it can be said that the students were delighted with the seminar, would recommend it and learned about usability.

Keywords:

Education, Digital Humanities, Disability, Usability, Innovation.