Towards Improving the Accessibility and Usability of a Mobile-based Learning Management System for Blind Primary School Teachers

Learning management systems (LMS) have been widely adopted to deliver learning materials for blended and online courses. Nonetheless, most of these systems suffer from accessibility and usability flaws that prevent visually impaired users from using them effectively. Despite existing studies evaluating the accessibility and usability of LMSs, very few of them have been done with actual visually impaired users. This study assessed the accessibility and usability of the Moodle LMS with 15 visually impaired teachers from 3 schools in 3 regions in Tanzania. The study used the Axe Dev automated tool and Concurrent Think Aloud Protocol usability testing in two phases. Results show that despite efforts of LMSs such as Moodle to follow accessibility and usability guidelines, the system still has problems such as insufficient colour contrast, links with indiscernible text, meaningless alternative texts, and invisible gaps in the content. Furthermore, this accessibility and usability can only be detected while testing with real users. Therefore, we recommend putting more effort into real-world user testing before such a system can be deployed to visually impaired school teachers.