Accessibility and usability in complex web based learning applications: lessons from the PEARL project
Martyn Cooper, Chetz Colwell, Telmo Amaral · 2002
This paper reports approaches promoting accessibility for disabled students to science and engineering practical work, developed in a major European educational technology project PEARL. It has developed the facilities for conducting a range of teaching experiments in science and engineering subjects at higher education level remotely over the WWW. One of the initial rationales for the project was to facilitate increased access for disabled students to practical work in these disciplines. This paper concentrates on one of these practicals based on the remote control of an optical spectrometer. It briefly describes the overall systems architecture and then the user interface sub-system. The approaches adopted to promote accessibility for disabled students at both systems and interface levels are outlined. It reports the results of interim expert evaluations and user trials with this prototype and how these have informed the subsequent development work. Lessons from this work are generalisable to other Web based applications, particularly with JAVA based client applications or applets.