Investigating e-learning accessibility for visually-impaired students: an experimental study

• Autores: Po-Hsin Huang, Ming-Chuan Chiu, Sheue-Ling Hwang, Jan-Li Wangan
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 31, no. Extra 2, 2015, págs. 495-504
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • STEM education has long been recognized as the foundation for national competitiveness and future prosperity. InSTEM, mathematics serves as the key to other areas (science, technology and engineering). Existing evidence shows that anintegrated curriculum in mathematics enhanced the majority of students’ performances on standardized tests. However,many visually-impaired students seem to fail to reach proficiency in mathematics. In this paper, we present a new approachto promote vision-impaired students’ overall math performance and enrich their learning experiences. We first investigatedstudent learning difficulties and then developed a new mathematics curriculum with the integration of the DigitalAccessible Information System (DAISY). This curriculum mainly addresses DAISY-compliant electronic textbooks thatcan be displayed on a Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader. Finally, we conducted an experiment in order toevaluate the effects of the new teaching approach. The experiment included a four-day pedagogical program and anassessment session. Specifically, the test focused on students’ mathematics scores and their NASA-TLX subjective mentalworkload. The findings showed that the value of the NASA-TLX subjective scales (t= 4.271,p< 0.05) was significant andthe student accuracy rate increased. Thus, we conclude that this new method effectively improved vision-impairedstudents’ proficiency in mathematics.