IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

Accessibility and science communication – new directions and
guidelines for Moodle “Estaleiro da Ciência”
N.Regadas 1,2 , J. Santos 2 , B.Giesteira 3
1 Jornalismo e Ciências da Comunicação, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto, Portugal.
2 IBMC (Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular – Universidade do Porto).
3 Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, Portugal.
Science communication on a web context raises several accessibility and usability questions
that us, as communicators, should recognize and exceed. Because Moodle has one of the
highest worldwide implementation ratings on e-learning and b-learning platforms, the adoption
of good web usability and accessibility practices, at all levels, becomes mandatory. “Estaleiro
da Ciência - Oficinas” has a different approach on science teaching and learning, aiming to be
a model for future b-learning applications. Having W3C guidelines for a starter and following
Nick Freear and Chetz Colwell [1] accessibility report on Moodle 1.6 version, as well as other
documents, we examined the 1.7 version to see if it was according to those guidelines. Our
main goal is to format the "Estaleiro da Ciência" Moodle, so that it is in total conformity with
the first accessibility level, proposed by WAI of the W3C.
The IBMC “Estaleiro da Ciência – Oficinas” cluster was subjected to automatic and manual
accessibility evaluations; for usability evaluations Lavery’s [2] modified structure of Nielsen’s
Heuristics was used among an empiric observation method with five users; the four months of
empiric experience working with the platform, and the discussions on Moodle forums were
also considered for this study case.
Our objective is to bring the programmer’s and the designer’s world closer together. Although
some changes are only possible if php programming is used, others can be done resorting to
CSS and internal HTML editors. Labels and HTML blocks are useful tools to develop and
improve accessibility features. Despite the good accessibility results of Moodle 1.7 version, in
compliance with WAI first level of priority, an additional effort is being made to make it
compliant with other W3C standards. Special attention was given to navigational elements as
they are one of the most important elements on a system like this. Our results revealed that
usability can be improved virtually without any programming involved. Tests revealed that too
many side blocks, links and options lead to user’s frustration. This variable is controllable if
changes are made to the course’s layout. Users must be fully concentrated on the contents,
instead of feeling lost with such a vast amount of information. Moodle’s standard version is
not very user friendly, even though it’s not very difficult to learn how to operate it. The main
idea is that technology has to adapt to our needs and not the other way.
Although this is a study case, all drawn conclusions and recommendations can be implemented
to similar structures. This project is still ongoing, and has a huge potential of applicability and
future work perspectives.
References:
[1] Freear, Nick and Colwell, Chetz., Improving the Accessibility of Moodle, Experiences,
guidelines and the road ahead, The Open University, 2006 [Acessed 25th March 2007]
Available:http://moodlemoot.org/file.php/3/presentation_materials/nick.f_chetz.c_OU/MoodleMoo
t_slides_ndf_cc_FINAL_2.pdf
[2] Heuristic Evaluation was originally proposed by Nielsen and Molich (Nielsen and Molich,
1990). The structure was, later on, modified by Nielsen (Nielsen, 1994).
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