The accessibility of digital technologies in the European Union (EU) varies from country to country, due, in part, to differences in accessibility-related legislation. In October 2016, the European Parliament accepted a directive on the accessibility of websites and mobile applications provided by public sector bodies (Directive (EU) 2016/2102). New public sector websites in the EU will need to conform by 23 September 2019, all public sector websites will need to conform by 23 September 2020, and all public sector mobile apps will need to conform by 23 June 2021. The directive references standard EN 301 549, which has been updated to reflect the requirements in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. This new legal situation will create a greater demand for accessibility-related training and training resources for public sector bodies. The EU-funded project MOOCAP (MOOC Accessibility Partnership, https://moocap.gpii.eu/, September 2014 - August 2017) created 11 free online courses about various aspects of digital accessibility. Four of these courses ran as MOOCs (massive open online courses) on platforms such as FutureLearn and edX. The resources from these courses are freely available as Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0). This licence allows anyone to share, adapt and redistribute the content of the OERs, provided that they correctly attribute the MOOCAP partner (or partners) who created the resources. This presentation will briefly present the MOOCAP project, the courses it created (especially those that are still available) and the Open Educational Resources it made available.
Speakers: Christophe Strobbe