An E-Learning Environment for Nontraditional Students with Sight Disabilities

ICTs and e-learning technologies have been exploited thoroughly, in an effort to improve the education procedures and techniques and ensure that nontraditional students (disabled students, distance students and sensitive social groups), gain equal access to information, knowledge, education and employment. This paper presents a multi-purpose e-environment for educative and informative services in the domain of engineering education for students with visual impairments. This e-environment can be used for actions that support online e-classes as well as e-activities that belong within the domains of lifelong training and distance learning. It was built aiming at smoothing the handicaps of the visually impaired students, enhancing their skills and covering both their special personal and communicative needs, mainly by redirecting the information through other sensory routes. Special "Assistive Technology" was used and the principles of "Design for All" and "Universal Accessibility" were followed, in order to produce a user-friendly and easily navigable environment for this nontraditional group of students in engineering education