Assessing the accessibility of online learning

Abstract

A wide range of tools is now available to enable teaching practitioners to create web‐based educational materials from PowerPoint presentations, adding a variety of different digital media, such as audio and animation. The pilot study described in this paper compared three different systems for producing multimedia presentations from existing PowerPoint files. The resulting resources were tested by a group of disabled students and a group of non‐disabled students. Our findings show that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups in relation to their interaction with the resources. In particular, the students with disabilities were significantly more active in using the available controls to customise the running of the presentations. The data suggest that future work on why students with accessibility issues made different uses of these resources could encourage practitioners’ deployment of multimedia resources for the benefit of all learners.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to the students who participated in this study and to Noel Murphy and Colin Hewitt for allowing us to use their PowerPoint presentation materials. We are grateful to the University of Leicester Fund for New Teaching Initiatives for supporting the work described in this report and to the University of Leicester Teaching Enhancement Forum and GENIE CETL for providing post funding for Dr Badge.

Notes

1. Flash, http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/; Adobe Presenter, http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/; Impatica, http://www.impatica.com/.