Honors Undergraduate Thesis
Accessibility User Research for Online Synchronous Learning
BACKGROUND
During my senior year of college, I was met with a new challenge in conjunction with the COVID-19 Pandemic: a fully virtual classroom. While myself and some of my peers struggled to adjust to this new way of learning initially, I became curious about how virtual learning was impacting my peers with disabilities, thus prompting my thesis research in accessibility accommodations for students who were hard-of-hearing.
At the time, many instructors were just getting by when it came to remote teaching, and many struggled with keeping students engaged. Additionally, popular virtual meeting spaces were not as advanced as they are today, for example, when I started my research, Zoom did not offer free closed-captioning which put some students with hearing and learning disabilities at a disadvantage.
GOALS
Identify user problems for people who are hard-of-hearing
Assess the usability of the current platforms being used by higher education
Create a guide for instructors and students to use to make a more inclusive online learning environment
PLANNING
Initially, I wanted to focus my research on how augmented reality could be used as an aid for people with a variety of disabilities. Thankfully my advisor helped me realize I was biting off more than I could chew for an undergraduate thesis; he guided me to narrow the scope to an accomplishable goal.
This was the first research project I had ever taken on of this depth and intensity, and it required me to stay organized. I used Zotero to organize the research articles and citations I collected, and I created strict deadlines for myself to complete sections of the research to ensure I completed it by the time I expected to graduate.
EXECUTION
Reflectively, I realized what I aimed to accomplish in this research was user experience research, but I had no formal background in UXR at the time.
Execution of the research took approximately nine months to complete in conjunction with my other full-time courses. Initial research required me to review current research in the fields of online learning, hearing disabilities, and legal compliance of accommodating people with disabilities. I went through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process to conduct user interviews with students who had hearing disabilities.
Once I gained an understanding of those aspects individually, I started to piece together how these aspects interact leading to a 40+ page research paper. In addition, I wanted to create something that could be used as a teaching tool for instructors and students. So, I created visual guidelines to teach others about creating a more inclusive and accommodating environment in Zoom.
Click this link to read the thesis.
Click this link to view the guidelines.
REFLECTIONS
Since this was my first attempt at a thesis and user experience research, I think it was successful; however, if I were to do it again, there are things I would change to make it more user research-focused including
Heuristic evaluations of virtual popular learning environments
User testing of current products and/or designs for better solutions
More user interviews
Accessibility audit my visual guide
Additional Accessibility Work: Audits
After my initial exploration into user accessibility research in college, I took graduate-level courses in accessible UX that inspired me to incorporate accessible practices into websites and apps I frequently used or worked with.
So, while working as a contractor with Favor as I finished grad school, I initiated a project to run an audit on their website to see where they were not meeting standards and presented my findings to the design team.
Using the WCAG 2.1 AA standards, I ran an audit for Favor Delivery’s website. Overall, the website performed well under WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
Still, it lacked in some areas such as no alt text on images, poor color contrast, confusing hierarchy and labeling, a lack of error identification and prevention, and parsing issues which I explained to our design team and product managers. Though they could not take immediate action on it, they took the research and tried to incorporate it into future roadmaps.
