Acessibilidade Digital Durante a Pandemia da COVID-19 - Uma Investigação sobre as Instituições de Ensino Superior Públicas Brasileiras

Abstract

Emergency remote education was the main alternative to keeping the teaching and learning process active with the social isolation that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many higher education institutions had little or no experience with this teaching modality. However, they had to adapt their methodologies promptly, adopting tools to enable synchronous and asynchronous communication between teachers and students, making teaching material available, and performing educational activities. Digital accessibility is essential to allow all students, including those with disabilities, to have equal access to the learning, especially in the context of remote education. This article aims to provide a diagnostic summary of the technologies and other resources available in Brazilian governmental higher education institutions (at federal and state levels) to support emergency remote education during the COVID19 pandemic, with a focus on providing digital accessibility. The methodology encompassed freedom of information requests to 141 institutions, with data analysis of 110 complete or partial responses. The results showed that most institutions had data on undergraduate students with disabilities. Many use software tools and accessible resources, with a smaller proportion of institutions that kept records on graduate students with disabilities. Most institutions that responded to the requests used remote education approaches during the pandemic period. The results detail the institutions' installed capacity to support digital accessibility for students in this context, such as the preparation of Virtual Learning Environments, accessibility of multimedia content, specialized professionals (such as sign language interpreters), and accessibility of digital books and assistive technologies. The study concludes that significant advances have already been made in Brazil's public higher education institutions to improve accessibility. However, many institutions will need to adapt to continue using digital educational resources, since it expects to grow after the experience with remote education in the pandemic and to provide adequate accessible resources.