Inclusive Education: Is Applying Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to Digital Learning Materials Enough?

Digital tools can support higher education in being inclusive, so that anyone, regardless of their skills and preferences, may benefit from it, provided that learning modules and materials are designed to be accessible. Digital accessibility is a well-known topic, applied since the late 90s to the World Wide Web, and starting from 2010 to mobile applications, with some useful guidelines that can be used when designing content; yet it is not so widespread in learning and higher education. This paper aims at analysing how the most important among these guidelines, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, may be applied to the most common forms of materials used in learning (namely slides presentations and text documents) and to which extent. Results show that while a large number of requirements can and should be met when designing learning materials, some of them are not content-oriented but rather technology-oriented and may benefit from a reformulation.