Accessibility in an educational software system: Experiences and Design Tips

Accessibility has been recognized as a key aspect of using technology for education, Yet educational software, including web-based systems, and even the main web-pages of top institutions often do not meet accessibility standards. When addressing accessibility issues, some creators of educational technology attempt to merely retrofit accessibility. Such an approach of "accessibility as an afterthought" often leads to low quality or even ineffective user interfaces (UI) and degraded user experience (UX) for all users, In order to avoid the aforementioned common pitfalls, we pursued an agile development process with an accessibility expert integrated into the process. The agile method has been used to develop a web based automatic testing and grading software system called CODE. This paper presents our agile method and experiences with designing and developing an accessible software system. We discuss the software design and the some of the accessibility improvements recommended to meet accessibility standards. We present statistical analysis of 3,300 submissions from 47 students and their experiences. Our experience shows that even if software tools are able to identify accessibility issues, they are not effective in suggesting appropriate solutions to address them. A key "lesson learned" is that integrating an accessibility expert into software development teams is an effective approach to ensure effective and accessible UI/UX for educational technologies.