Keywords: Moodle, user, blind students, platform, Interface Design.
Introduction Nowadays there are a lot of learning management systems in the educational platforms and Moodle [2] is
one of them. Moodle is a widely used open-source learning management system (LMS), that now accounts for
over 200 million users on over 151000 websites in the educational sphere. One of the Moodle customers is
International Information Technology University (IITU) which uses the LMS for their internal intranet system.
The existing user interfaces of learning management systems may often be exclusive towards groups of
people with some sort of disabilities or restrictions without any particular reason. UI design of educational
learning systems does not always take into account people with impaired vision (people with best corrected
vision is 20/40 or worse), color blind or completely blind people.
More than 2 million of blind people, representing 1% of the Moodle users, are not getting higher education
due to the lack of accessibility.
The paper is organized in the following way:
- first, we provide an overview of the existing web interface for Moodle and how well it is adapted for usage
with screen readers [3];
- next, we present an improved user interface that we assume would work better for visually impaired users,
as well as provide a rationale behind the new interface
- after that, we explain the methodology behind our user study conducted with the help of a group of users;
- in the final section, we perform comparison of the old and proposed interfaces against selected relevant
metrics, as well as provide the summary of our user study.
Related works Most of the studies related to the usability of User Interfaces are focused on the visual component and do
not account for the users having poor or no vision. With the development of open-source screen readers like
Non-Visual Desktop Access [1] (NVDA), more and more visually impaired users are gaining access to the
resources on the Internet.
NVDA is a free, open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows. It is developed by NV Access in
collaboration with a global community of contributors. NVDA allows blind or visually impaired people to
use a computer, access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party applications.
The software provides a way for users to perform basic operations, such as moving the cursor, text-to-speech
conversion, as well as using the built-in keyboard shortcuts provided by the operating system. A keyboard
or Braille display are used for inputting the commands, which eliminates the necessity for a mouse. The
information is delivered to the user through a synthetic voice or Braille output.