Evaluating the accessibility to disabled people of e-assessment tools

E-assessment tools offer enormous potential for educational organisations to support disabled students in a flexible, accessible way, while also helping to meet legal obligations to avoid undue discrimination. However, tools need to support authors in creating assessments without introducing accessibility barriers. Information on the extent to which e-assessment tools support accessible assessment authoring is scarce; and where information does exist, this tends to be focused on the accessibility of the output, rather than the quality of the authoring process. An accessibility evaluation methodology was developed and used by the authors to review a popular e-assessment tool. The review identified a number of accessibility issues with the software interface and output. It also found issues that might limit the ability of authors to create optimally accessible assessments, meaning a modified approach to training and support is required, as well as improvements to the assessment tool. Organisations evaluating e-assessment tools for accessibility therefore need to seriously consider how effective these tools are in supporting accessible authoring, rather than limiting attention to the accessibility of the output of the tool.