IFRN making distance
education more accessible

Responsibilities

• Making the entire usability testing process, including planning, setting goals, coordination, and communication with the product manager, development and design team;
• Advocating the need of applying usability tests to improve user experience to teams;
• Being the test facilitator, interacting directly with blind students during the usability test. Providing clear instructions, assisting participants and encouraging communication to gather valuable feedback and insights;
• Gathering and analysing the usability test results to extract insights and transform them into better user experiences;
• Collaborating on proposing potential solutions for improving the accessibility and usability of the platform.

The goal of the project was to identify the flaws in the file-sending area in the platform that impeded blind users’ autonomy while studying on Moodle.

The students couldn't submit their homework

Students from IFRN EaD frequently need to submit homework assignments for assessment when they finish a lesson. In order to have the tasks corrected, they are required to upload files that allow teachers to review and provide feedback on their work through the platform.  

By using the IFRN platform, blind students faced problems when trying to upload these files on their own and were often using email as an alternative method to accomplish this task. This caused some problems:

• Lack of autonomy: students felt they could not deliver the assignments without the help of other people to check if the file had been successfully sent on the platform.
• Needing an external product: students needed to find and look for solutions on their own to send the files to the teachers.
• Missing deadlines and communication issues: if the student used another way to send files to the teacher, this could cause communication problems, because it needs extra effort from the student to let teachers know they had already sent their homework. If the teacher does not see the email by the given deadline, the students would face problems to later explain that they had done the task on time.
• Inconvenience: from the teacher's point of view, it would be more convenient to receive files from all the students from a single location.

Finding frustrations for inclusive learning

First, it was necessary to understand the students’ background, the aspirations and frustrations they had regarding their education. To achieve this, an interview was conducted with them and the following findings were uncovered:

• They face difficulties in face-to-face classes in Brazil as materials are often not adapted for Braille, and teachers may lack the necessary structure and expertise to provide proper support for individuals with visual impairments;
• They see distance education as an invaluable opportunity to pursue higher education. The IFRN's distance education program attracts these individuals due to its recognition as a reputable institution in Brazil;
• Some of these students did not experience blindness from birth but rather had to face a gradual loss of autonomy alongside their visual impairment. The inability to independently perform tasks they once accomplished creates feelings of frustration, with studying being an example;
• Visually impaired students get frustrated when using IFRN's online classes because sometimes the technology doesn't make it easy to use, which makes their experience worse.

Implementing audio cues

After discovering the root cause of the problem, a solution for each lack of feedback in the platform was implemented. Audio cues were added into the user journey to make the upload status of files clear to students.

• "Your file is successfully uploaded."
• "Your assignment has been sent."
• "Couldn't upload file."
• "The file has been deleted."

Additionally, the redesign involved removing excessive visual elements and reorganising text and links into a logical sequence. This was done to minimise errors and prevent students from getting lost in the interaction.

Iterating

By implementing the solutions, we ran another test which showed a good success rate in task completion among participants. Moreover, in the majority of tasks, we could observe a significant reduction in execution time. Testing the restructured navigation, specifically designed for screen readers, confirmed its effectiveness by simplifying user interactions and improving efficiency.  

However, this new analysis also revealed previously unrecognised accessibility and usability issues resulting in new requirements to develop solutions to be implemented in future updates. Some of the new issues found were related to:  

• Labels from some buttons were not clear, did not match the actual action to be performed, and were also unfamiliar to the participants. The participants confused the term “Cancel” with the delete action;
• New opportunities to add more feedback arose such as saving changes, alerting when a file has the wrong extension or not being an acceptable size.
• As they had many files attached, it was unclear which “delete” button was referring to each specific file.