Investigating E-Learning Accessibility for Visually-Impaired Students: An Experimental Study

摘要

STEM education has long been recognized as the foundation for national competitiveness and future prosperity. In STEM, mathematics serves as the key to other areas (science, technology and engineering). Existing evidence shows that an integrated curriculum in mathematics enhanced the majority of students' performances on standardized tests. However, many visually-impaired students seem to fail to reach proficiency in mathematics. In this paper, we present a new approach to promote vision-impaired students' overall math performance and enrich their learning experiences. We first investigated student learning difficulties and then developed a new mathematics curriculum with the integration of the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY). This curriculum mainly addresses DAISY-compliant electronic textbooks that can be displayed on a Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) screen reader. Finally, we conducted an experiment in order to evaluate the effects of the new teaching approach. The experiment included a four-day pedagogical program and an assessment session. Specifically, the test focused on students' mathematics scores and their NASA-TLX subjective mental workload. The findings showed that the value of the NASA-TLX subjective scales (t = 4.271, p ＜ 0.05) was significant and the student accuracy rate increased. Thus, we conclude that this new method effectively improved vision-impaired students' proficiency in mathematics.