Abstract:

Nowadays, one of the main challenges within our education system is to guarantee the quality of teaching for all students. Hence, accessibility is a vital requisite for all universities to provide an adequate interaction with the students. This interaction can be developed not only in physical spaces but also in virtual ones. The integration of students with special needs has recently been a complete success. Nevertheless, the inclusion of these students in the teaching-learning processes is highly necessary. Thus, didactic approaches recognising differentiation, fostering educational contexts as well as integrating complex and flexible strategies are essential to provide learning resources from diversity. Particularly, both teaching training programmes and universities are making a huge effort to improve the knowledge from a cultural and functional diversity approach, invigorating the teaching curricula. However, there is a lack of awareness about universal access and the inclusion in the varied study plans. Likewise, there is a need of further resources, teaching training and competencies to support differentiation within universities.

Principally, one of the training programmes that has recently been thriving in the area of universal accessibility is the one related to the business environment and customer relationship management. Increasingly, companies are becoming more and more aware of the importance of universal accessibility. Furthermore, there is an important market segment with special difficulties in accessing their products and services among their target audience (Kim & Peterson, 2017; Zhang et al., 2019). Thus, training in student competencies in accessibility in customer relationship management is particularly important (in university-level training programmes).

The main objective of this paper is to deepen into in the universal accessibility concept and to analyse its application within the business environment. In this sense, the concepts that are studied in the different degrees of the Spanish universities will be pinpointed, focusing in the economic and business areas. Additionally, the experience of the Degree in Marketing and Market Research from the University of Almería, where there is already a teaching group that is working to incorporate these contents in the degree, will be detailed. In order to achieve these objectives, the current legislation and the existing secondary information will be reviewed. In short, it is intended to provide a guide that can be helpful so that students and future professionals know the needs and requirements of people with functional diversity or accessibility limitations in the economic and business environments. For this reason, a methodology based on the analysis of documentary sources on the contents of the curricula and an exploratory research directed at a sample of university professors, students, and clients will be used in-depth interviews. This will allow us to know what approach and measures should be adopted to provide the inclusion of universal accessibility in training curricula, promoting awareness, diffusion and dynamism with teaching resources in any type of degree.

References:
[1] Kim, Y., & Peterson, R.A. (2017). A meta-analysis of online trust relationships in e-commerce. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 38, 44-54.
[2] Zhang, Y., Abbas, H., & Sun, Y. (2019). Smart e-commerce integration with recommender systems. Electronic Markets, 29(2), 219-220.

Keywords:

Universal accessibility, Functional Diversity, Higher Education Institutions, Customer Service.