Computer-Assisted Assessment for Accessibility Awareness

Background

The Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning – Active Learning in Computing (CETL ALiC) is a HEFCE-funded collaborative project involving Leeds Metropolitan University and the universities of Durham, Leeds and Newcastle.

Following research into the experiences of students with cognitive impairments such as dyslexia, the CETL developed a computer-based test designed to familiarise users with some of the issues faced by disabled students for use in staff development sessions.

The Test

The test questions were designed to simulate the kind of experience disabled students may face during computer based assessment, in order to encourage empathy from staff, in a similar way to the SimDis tool hosted by JISC TechDis (www.techdis.ac.uk/simdis). For example, to draw attention to the difficulties some users experience over fine motor control of a mouse one question has the radio button option choices moving around the screen whenever an attempt is made to click on them. Another, designed to illustrate colour-blindness, has the question “What is the most commonly occurring form of colour-blindness?” and options “Red/Green”, “Yellow/Blue” and “Purple/Pink”. These options are initially rendered almost illegibly with little colour discrimination between lettering and background, to try to give an experience of how they might appear to a colour-blind person. Users can then request that the options are rendered in contrasting colours or as black text on a white background. Each question includes advice and further references for staff to follow up.

To date the test has been used during two staff development workshops, each with fifteen participants, which were delivered by three facilitators and included discussion time.

Feedback

Feedback on the workshops has been largely positive, with staff enjoying the interactive nature of the test and feeling that they had developed more insight and empathy into the experiences of disabled students as a result. Suggestions for further improvement included incorporating follow-up sessions, more in-depth training such as analysing existing resources, and more practical examples of accessible teaching resources to build on the awareness raising aspect of the test.

Future work and further development

It is hoped to develop the test as a standalone resource by providing further links and references. Allowing for discussion time in the workshops did not leave a lot of time for participants to use the references provided; it may be that users would have time to gain more knowledge by using the test as a self study tool.

The workshop was repeated during the Higher Education Academy’s Annual Conference in July 2007. Feedback was again very positive, with participants requesting that the test is made more widely available on the web. In response to earlier feedback individual “good practice” pages were produced for each question and it was suggested that these should be available to print, either individually or as a set.

The group intend to approach the Education department to offer the training to new staff, for example those undertaking the PG Cert (HE) and eventually to offer it to the partner institutions within the CETL. It may also be offered to students within the Faculty of Information and Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University, to raise awareness of accessibility issues within interface design. It is also hoped to make the test available on the CETL ALiC Website in the future.