Proposal for Development of Teaching Methodology and Accessibility Tool for Professional Qualification of Visual and Mobility Impaired People

Abstract

According to 2000 Cense, there are approximately 24.5 million people in Brazil who have some kind of deficiency, where the visually and mobility impaired are the majority. The government actions are mainly taken toward to basic education, so not many advanced education programs are destined to impaired people. Although some specialized institutions usually offer several technical courses, they are considered basic-level, and don’t prepare them to get more qualified jobs. On the other hand, the number of corporations that offer jobs to them is reduced. Our institution NCE/UFRJ has been developing accessibility tools since 1993, which provides access to information through, but not only, the Internet. Based on this context, NCE/UFRJ has created the Projeto Habilitar, which main goals are to provide intermediate to high-level courses in both administrative and technical areas for impaired people, to develop a teaching methodology and to develop or upgrade accessibility tools to be used in future courses and by other institutions as well. The strategy applied to start this project was to deploy a pilot course. The course chosen is called Cisco Networking Academy Program, implemented by Cisco Systems Inc., the biggest corporation in networking technology of the world.