People with intellectual disabilities often have difficulties in accessing public and/or private places. There are some psychological and informational barriers that limit their opportunities to participate actively in their community. This fact also limits the action and competences of professionals in the field of social inclusion due to the lack of some specific training resources. Although there are some courses focused on autonomy skills for people with mental disabilities, as well as some courses for social workers and educators by using Information and Communication Technologies, those training resources do not consider a key actor such as public and private places’ owners (business users).
For this reason, the European project MinInclusion 3.0 aims to create a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), understood as an educational model developed in the online modality and characterized by the use of the Internet and ICT resources, as a training opportunity for business users in the field of inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. To this end, six co-creation session in three European countries (Italy, Spain, and Romania) were carried out with a total of 45 business users from different sectors and profiles. The goal was to find potential needs of both business users and people with intellectual disabilities when it comes to accessing public/private places in order to create a co-validated training course available for the MOOC. This course should be able to raise awareness of the need of people with mental disabilities when accessing public/private places and to enable business users to adapt their business to people with intellectual disabilities’ needs.
The results have shown that cognitive accessibility is an unknown need by business users who usually focused more on physical barriers as cognitive barriers still hider do to the lack of awareness.