International audience

Despite the promotion of equal access to education, the proportion of persons with disabilities decreases drastically from primary school to higher education, resulting in a lower level of education. This lack of qualification represents an additional obstacle to employment opportunities, reinforcing their exclusion from the social sphere. In recent years, computer-based approaches to education have undergone a real revolution, as reflected by the massive growth of MOOCs platforms. As they are flexible enough, they could provide a real opportunity to create learning environments that are beneficial to persons with disabilities. Unfortunately, most MOOCs are not ‘sufficiently’ accessible, especially for persons with cognitive impairments and limited learning capacities. In this article, we describe the results of a participatory design process that involved students with cognitive impairments and specialists from various fields of expertise and led to the co-design of new functionalities to enhance the accessibility of a MOOC player. We also present the results of a multiple-cases study evaluation of a first prototype, whose results support the positive impact of our design decisions. Finally, we propose an integrative framework for the design of accessible e-learning systems derived from the different needs and guidelines that emerged during the process.

Our physiological activity reflects our inner workings. However, we are not always aware of it in full detail. Physiological devices allow us to monitor and create adaptive systems and support introspection. Given that these devices have access to sensitive data, it is vital that users have a clear understanding of the internal mechanisms (extrospection), yet the underlying processes are hard to understand and control, resulting in a loss of agency. In this work, we focus on bringing the agency back to the user, by using design guidelines based on principles of honest communication and driven by positive activities. To this end, we conceived a tangible, modular approach for the construction of physiological interfaces that can be used as a prototyping toolkit by designers and researchers, or as didactic tools by educators and pupils. We show the potential of such an approach with a set of examples, supporting introspection, dialog, music creation, and play.

Mixed Reality systems combine physical and digital worlds, with great potential for the future of HCI. It is possible to design systems that support flexible degrees of virtuality by combining complementary technologies. In order for such systems to succeed, users must be able to create unified mental models out of heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we present two studies focusing on the users' accuracy on heterogeneous systems using Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) displays, and combining viewpoints (egocentric and exocentric). The results show robust estimation capabilities across conditions and viewpoints.