L Moniz Pereira, C Espadinha, E C C Saragoça
Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Educação Especial e Reabilitação, Lisboa, Portugal
The educational support concerning special curriculum areas becomes sometimes very difficult to implement in particular in low incidence groups. An itinerant teacher can be one of the solutions but usually he/she supports more than one school, therefore not having the time requested to develop the necessary co-operative work with the regular teacher. One possible solution is to create a mixed support system flexible enough to answer all needs, by using the contribution of distance education.
To achieve those objectives the terminal accessibility was based on the Design for All principles (taken into account the perceptual and cognitive accessibility). It was composed by a personal computer equipped with a videoconference card and an ISDN network controller. Terminal evaluation main focus was the interface improvement aiming to define the easiest interface and procedures simplification towards intuitive use (e.g. cursor and icons enlargment, colour and fonts definitions, backgroung colour, cursor maintain contrast between figure and ground during its movements).
An example of our distance education work using that interface, was the development of a visual training programme with 14 low vision children and youngsters attending regular schools. The evaluation and rehabilitation program was based on Barraga work. The evaluation was carried out in two distinct moments (beginning and after training) All users had between 12 to 14 visual training sessions (25 minutes each). Significant results were found in the following programme areas: Discriminate, recognise borders and details (p>0.001); Identify and understand isolate and combine symbols (p>0.001); Relates the part with the whole (p>0.005).
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