Service Center for Accessible Media and Assistive Technologies

As a response to the growing use of digitalization in higher education, DoBuS establishes a new service center for accessible media and assistive technologies.

Digitalization provides great opportunities to make learning and research more accessible for everyone while also taking into account different needs of users. If digital learning materials and learning environments are not accessible, however, new obstacles to study can emerge for students with disabilities.

The new service center assesses the opportunities that digital media and assistive technologies offer for accessibility in higher education. Both students and members of the university are given advice and support to ensure digital accessibility.

Students can test out assistive technologies and tools and are advised and trained on how to use them as needed for their current situation in their studies.

To university staff, the Service Center provides advice, training, and support in the preparation of accessible digital teaching and learning materials. These formats include everything from text-based digital documents to various audiovisual formats.

In particular, DoBuS helps with the design and acquisition of e-learning applications and software to fulfill accessibility requirements. Together with teachers and students, one focus of its work will be to develop solutions for making complex e-learning applications (e.g. real-time chat, shared documents, virtual labs, etc.) more accessible and usable. Therefore, an usability lab will be established, in which skilled students with disabilities are testing the usability and accessibility of new services.

The current workspace and assistive technology pool and the accessible design of teaching and examination materials will be incorporated in the new service center together with the services they already offer.

In 2020, priority will initially be given to setting up the service center described above. In the interest of a development that has been tested in practice, however, the first consulting and support activities will already be initiated in the set-up phase.