Design And Implementation Of Accessible Mobile Learning Resources For Hearing-impaired Children

Information accessibility is an excellent way to show the information equality in the age of Internet, and also a positive effort to reduce the digital gaps between the disabled and the non-disabled. With the advances in information technology, information accessibility changes more or less both internally and externally. In the age of Internet, information accessibility was mostly acted by the disabled via computers freely. While in the age of mobile learning, it was externally extended to the “mobile accessibility”, which means that the disabled will be surely able to surf internet and get information via mobile devices. This study chooses hearing-impaired children-a vulnerable group as the object to analyze the physiological and cognitive characteristics of them together with the characteristics of mobile devices and mobile learning based on above factors. It guides the development and realization of the accessible mobile learning resources for the hearing-impaired children to some extent, by designing the accessible mobile learning resources from knowledge learning, resource exchanging, tool aiding, emotion compensating, burden reducing and other aspects which theoretically gives tips on the design.The construction of the accessible mobile learning resources for the hearing-impaired children is an advanced and exploratory research based on the vivid cases for the idea of accessible design. This study selects the case of learning the mother language-sign language for the hearing-impaired children, which approves well the feasibility and circumstances for the content of mobile learning. The “micro video” will be the major media for the sign language learning, together with texts, images, which vividly shows the characteristics of sign language and meets the “Visual” learning demands for the hearing-impaired children. Also, with the development of finger touching, the social media, such as, short message, e-mail, weibo, wechat and so on, helps overcome the inconveniences for mobile devices input and the obstacles of language inadequacy for the hearing-impaired children. On the other hand, it provides solutions for building the learning common community of the hearing-impaired children and resource sharing which indirectly makes up for the emotion loss caused by non-fluent communication for the hearing-impaired children.