Importance of Accessible Science Education
P1 (paraphrased): I wanted to study Chemistry, but when I started losing my sight in high school, my teachers could not figure out a way for me to do it. They suggested Biology, but still that was still a passive experience.
P6: " Interesting, I hear you talk about the negative charges and everything, and I feel kind of stupid because I don't even remember if like the little static shocks we get are negative or positive."
PhET Sims are Effective Learning Tools
Implicit Scaffolding
Target User
Student with vision loss who uses a screen reader and a keyboard.
Problem
- No description for visual representations
- No keyboard access for interaction
- A black box to screen readers
Design Challenge
- Access: Descriptions of visual representations in a mode that is perceivable to the user.
- Action: Buttons & interactions that are operable via the keyboard.
- Agency: Descriptions & interactions are understandable & make sense when accessed in different ways.
Methods: Inclusive Iterative Evaluation
- Recruited 12 screen reader users: 5 women and 7 men, spanning 19 to 61 years.
- Hardware: Desktop PCs (2), Mac Air (2), Surface Pro 3 Tablet (1), Lenovo E541 (1), Lenovo T520 (6)
- Browser & Screen readers: Chrome & JAWS 17 professional (1), IE11 & JAWS 17 Home (1), Safari & VoiceOver (2), Firefox & JAWS 17 Home (1), Firefox & JAWS 15 (1), Firefox & JAWS 17 demo (5), Firefox & NVDA (1)
- Made changes to the prototype & descriptions in between interviews.
- Analysed recordings to identify issues with the design & the descriptions.
Design Features: PDOM, Hotkeys & Descriptions
Description Strategy Framework Emerged
- Static: do not change; form an outline of the sim.
- Dynamic: describe changes in the scientific model; form the main content of the sim.
- Interaction Alerts: strings that do not change, & are delivered dynamically to support interaction.
Conclusions & Future Work
Inclusive Design
- Focused on screen reader users
- Created an inclusive tool using an inclusive process
- Benefit students with dexterity impairments, teachers & other makers of highly interactive learning tools
Future Work
- Complete descriptions
- Provide help in more flexible and findable ways
- Investigate where sonification
- Apply our description framework to other sims
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