MOOCs unique potential lies in the fact that they have
discovered that there are millions of people of all ages around
the world eager to learn. MOOCs aspiration is to offer
large-scale participation and open access to anyone in the
world. MOOC courses bring great opportunities to enhance the
quality of life of elderly people by enabling lifelong learning
and inclusion in learning communities. These are the reasons
why it is important to successfully address web accessibility challenges of MOOCs for elderly students.
MOOCs do not differ much from earlier online courses: a
syllabus, lecture materials, activities, quizzes to assess learning,
and forums to discuss with instructors and fellow learners.
However, MOOCs present a significant challenge, since lecture
materials are mostly videos that have a lot of text or the content
is quite dense. In theory, the traditional captions enable full
access to videos for deaf and hard hearing people. However,
this is a myth: captions and visual text on videos may result
in visual dispersion and cognitive overload, causing a minor
learning among people who need captions [14].
The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness towards a
better understanding of the web accessibility challenges that
elderly users of MOOCs face. It presents preliminary results
of an analysis of courses hosted by MOOCs leading provider
Coursera. This study uses as base reference the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 published by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [15] in 2008. The rest of this
paper is organized in three sections. In Section II, we describe
the methodology used in this study. Section III presents the
results of the analysis and discussion. Section IV depicts the
conclusions and future work.