Abstract:

The Brazilian High School National Exam (ENEM) is the greatest large-scale university admission examination in Brazil. This exam totaled more than nine million enrollees in 2016 and seven million and six hundred enrollees in 2017, from which 1.414 and 964, respectively, were blind people. Currently, for a person with total visual impairment to be able to carry out ENEM, the test in Braille and human assistance is offered for reading and transcribing the exam. The need of this service links the blind candidate performance in the test to the abilities and qualification of other people. As a consequence, it may affect the performance of the blind candidate, due to the lack of autonomy to perform the test. People with total visual impairment often use personal computing devices with assistive technology in their educational activities. However, during ENEM, such technological resources are unavailable for them. Despite existing international experience of large-scale evaluations using assistive technology and computers, like the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and the American College Testing (ACT), such exams still do not allow the candidate with total visual impairment to carry it out with full autonomy. Based on this scenario, the Accessible ENEM, a web-based a computational application using screen reader technology, was designed as part of a master's research project aiming to introduce digital accessibility in large-scale evaluations for people with total visual impairment, thus allowing blind students to perform the entire examination with autonomy and eliminating existing communication barriers in the current procedure. This paper describes the design process of Accessible ENEM and how the concept of autonomy has guided the specification process requirements, the participation of visually impaired volunteers and the evaluation criteria used in the application development. Based on the User-Centered Design methodology and qualitative survey research, on standard ISO-IEC 25000 series (SQuaRE) and on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) accessibility guidelines, the application has been specified, developed, and evaluated. Thirty-three people with visual impairment participated in this study, divided into three groups with distinct roles. Group 1 was formed by two blind volunteers with different proficiencies in the screen reader technology, who acted as co-designers in the design process. To contribute in the requirements survey phase, twenty-eight volunteers with visual impairment were recruited (Group 2). Lastly, three blind volunteers formed Group 3, which evaluated the use of Accessible ENEM with autonomy. This methodology provided a comprehensive view on the context of application use, identifying impacts on the autonomy in several elements of the Information System necessary to make the exam really accessible for the visual impaired, thus the results of the study demonstrating the efficiency of the method, which considered autonomy as the main factor of Quality in Use for development and evaluation of digital accessibility applications for education. The research on digital accessibility in selective processes is continuing in the first author PhD thesis, using the same method described herein with the objective of making the test accessible to other types of disabilities, in accordance with the universal design.

Keywords:

Assistive Technology, Digital Accessibility, Blindness, Screen Reader, SQuaRE, Accommodation, Large-Scale Examination, ISO/IEC 25010.