LexDis Database
The students who participated in the LexDis project rarely mentioned their disabilities when discussing on-line strategies - the difficulties appeared to occur when they had to undertake a particular task as part of their course requirements so the design of the database was developed on this premise.
However, three main issues appear particular to disabled students:
Having to cope with new assistive technologies to assist learning at the beginning of a university career.
Having less time compared to other students to work online due to time taken up coping with issues related to disability.
A need to juggle technologies more effectively and in an agile way to assist learning.
Issues - Several issues may arise for students resulting from a Task that needs to be undertaken e.g. Spelling issues which may depend on the course studied so may be related to for example, academic writing containing complex computer or medical terms.
Tasks - specific to the curriculum which may lead to different issues e.g. usual spell checkers fail to find course related vocabulary.
Difficulties - may be experienced by a student due to the Task that needs to be undertaken - they may have written language difficulties that impacts on their spelling ability.
Strategies - provided by students and developed as a result of the Task undertaken linked to Issues arising and possible Difficulties. In this case the use of a medical on-line dictionary could be an example.
Students' web pages -
An overview of the undergraduate or post graduate studies with mention of some of the Strategies developed.
Applications - These are software programs used on courses such as using Adobe Acrobat Reader for .PDFs or Microsoft Word.
Technologies - These may be software or hardware items used to support strategies.
Guides - These are related to the issues that have arisen and aim to provide further guidance for students, academic support and technical staff.
Web Links - Useful websites or papers that are linked to applications, technologies and guides.