Social Accessibility Action to Improve Quality of OER User-generated Video-classes and Associated Resources

Social Accessibility is an approach to shorten the time for making web content more accessible by allowing ICT volunteers to improve its quality through collaborative work. In this context new forms of volunteerism have emerged through the creative and innovative use of ICTs. The first action in social ICT volunteering at UNED, the largest public distance university in Spain, took place in 2013 by enrolling 13 student volunteers. In 2014, the second action started with promising outcomes and more than 60 volunteers. The overall project aimed to improve the accessibility of original user-generated video learning resources contained in a multimedia repository of the university commonly used by the vast community of a quarter of a million students. The video classes were textually transcribed, subtitled and converted into mp3 audio. Its semantic labelling in the repository was also improved through collaborative volunteer metadata authoring. Main contribution of this paper is to show the ICT-based volunteering experience and the corresponding discussion on main findings. The experience has demonstrated the capacity of ICTs to promote social innovation at the universities and bring about citizen empowerment, in this case developing conscious awareness of the difficulties that must be faced daily by people with functional diversity and the benefits of implementing universal web accessibility.