Understanding m-learning experiences for blind students

Abstract

When designing educational technologies for blind people, we need to consider technological and pedagogical strands. From the pedagogical point of view, m-learning has the potential to benefit blind students. Regarding the technological aspect, m-learning is an appropriate approach for blind students. Motivated by the adequacy of m-learning and the scarcity of works involving m-learning experiences for blind students, we present an exploratory study to uncover important information when blind users interact with mobile applications, focusing on the educational and technological perspectives. We investigated the interactions of nine blind users with mobile devices to unveil their technology-related singularities in the educational context. Based on the familiarity of blind users, some interaction design patterns have proven to be easy to use after conducting a usability and user experience test on a prototype. The results also highlighted the relevance of educational mobile applications to provide greater independence to blind users. This paper contributes towards improving the current awareness of the accessibility aspect of m-learning collaborative tools, and reveals the aspects of interactions and needs of blind students.