Accessibility Issues Faced By Blind and Visually Impaired Persons in the Field of Studying and Education

This research has been done in a scope of the project IPA “Let’s study together”, led by the Faculty of Economics in Split, which aims to solve the major accessibility issues faced by blind and visually impaired persons in the field of studying and education. Adapting the process of studying, and bringing it closer to those with special needs is the biggest motivation behind the project. Since blind and visually impaired persons are in the minority, it often makes sighted majority to turn a blind eye to their problems. Implementing accessible studies at two faculties at University of Split should improve the situation. This research brings a detailed report on blind and visually impaired people habits, practices, impressions and their current experiences in the process of learning. Sighted people, whose world is visual, often don’t completely understand the issues dealt by blind people. Screen readers software has enabled independent information access to blind people. This paper describes a work in the first part of a project ? user requirements gathering. The work is divided into two main parts: questionnaire preparation phase and experimental results. The paper also brings short accessibility and screen reader introduction to get more familiar with the problem. Questionnaire preparation phase is achieved through approach of gathering both user observations and exhaustive technical part on screen reader behaviours. Testing cases took mostly HTML and PDF teaching materials formats into consideration. Use cases tested the elements considered to be the most problematic for a screen reader interpretation and/or other most frequently used teaching materials elements in various cases. General conclusion in these observations is that the most issues for blind and visually impaired people come from not properly structured or described content; complexity of the whole document or user interface; and not adaptable or responsive content to all kind of screen resolutions, magnification levels and background and foreground colours. Experimental research showed that 100 percent of blind interviewed participants use JAWS screen reader. 75 percent of all interviewed participants consider that the accessibility of learning process must be improved, and 100 percent stresses that their teaching materials must have defined standardized format. “Let’s study together” project is expected to identify, propose and generate solutions to blind and visually impaired person’s problems with e-learning teaching materials.