Abstract:

COVID19 pandemic crisis forced universities to transfer their classes to an online environment. As most educational institutions in the world, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, also started extensively using their online environment which was implemented in 2004. But teachers and some students with special needs had and still have some difficulties using this platform. But the problem is not using the system, but using the content, the online materials. Students with special needs (visual impairment and auditory impairment) require these online materials to be adapted for their use. ICT offers tools for adapting and extending these online materials and enables inclusion of students with special needs into the educational process. But using these ICT tools also requires additional competencies from teachers. In these special circumstances, when traditional educational tools were transferred into an online environment and new learning materials also had to be produced, there was also a need for improving digital competencies of teachers, introducing new tools and methods to help them adapt their materials for students with special needs. We focused on identifying the problems for these students through the interviews and identified the technologies needed for adapting learning materials and ways to solve the problems. Visually impaired students had problems with graphically explained topics and auditory impaired students sometimes had problems with videos not containing the presenter, only the graphical explanation. Most problems were solved with adding additional informational channels in the form of subtitles to the videos and therefore pushing the same information through additional channels. Others were solved by providing an abstract of the information provided through inaccessible media. These additional channels were also helpful to both groups, impaired and non-impaired, providing additional means to acquire information needed for the online courses.

Keywords:

Accessibility, e-learning, special needs.