This student is blind and uses a screen reader in conjunction with a braille display. This means everything on screen is read out to him by the computer, and he enters input by pressing on braille keys rather than a conventional keyboard.
This stage could be a disaster if the site(s) are inaccessible - sites here include all schools/courses, for all universities that the student is interested in. Disappointment can easily turn to feelings of impossibility and rejection from the institution. The student might even be lured into choosing only courses and universities that they can access descriptions for. Even this doesn't guarantee that the actual virtual environment will be accessible; accessible contact details are crucially important here should the student have questions. Did Justin choose the University he wanted to go to based on the course, or based on the fact he could actually access its description?
Webforms must be carefully designed to be accessible for screen readers without alienating the rest of the audience they need to be usable for. If the layout isn't logical, or if labels are ambiguously related to several form controls, Justin could end up going round in circles with multiple error messages when he doesn't think he's doing anything wrong; or worse, he could be submitting the wrong information but the badly designed system doesn't alert him to this. Despite this, online application could be beneficial to Justin - braille application forms are just as hard to lay out logically and fill in, and it's empowering not to have to rely on a third-party to complete the form.
This can be make or break time - Justin required a lot of technical and hand-holding support to get used to a badly conceived VLE. While he was an intermediate user of his software and hardware, the screens he was faced with didn't follow any logical order, and often didn't have consistently broken order on every page (which would have been an improvement even though it made no sense, as he could at least predict where links would appear). The Computing Support team were helpful in setting up the equipment, but they didn't have much experience with the VLE being used, and since they weren't blind, they didn't feel competent in testing pages themselves using his screen reader. Their role perhaps was more holistic, a reassurance that it was a technical rather than academic problem, and that it wasn't Justin's fault at all.
After a few weeks of practice and frequent guidance from Computing Support, Justin eventually felt more comfortable navigating the VLE interface. It didn't make any sense to his screen reader, but from listening to the links repeatedly he could construct a warped view in his mind of how to navigate around the different sections. He also found the forum section to be cumbersome to navigate, but again once he was accustomed to what it thought was the best layout to use, he was able to navigate quickly around it. The synchronous tasks proved impossible: the applets used for the live chat didn't even try to talk to his screen reader, and so he could type questions but couldn't receive any help/assistance in return. He phoned his tutor but agreed that by the time they'd got Computing Services involved, the chat session would be over and it may cause conflicts with other parts of the environment into trying to resolve the problem. As a result Justin missed out on around a third of the core course activities.
I had fun! It was tough in the first few weeks but I'm used to that kind of dfficulty with most websites anyway - what was most annoying was not the stupid layout of the web page, but the fact that I was eager to get into discussions and put down all my thoughts straight away; it was a shame that I had to jump through hoops to get to such a simple stage. After a while though I could work my way around the maze with my eyes closed (pun intended!) and really enjoyed the course. If it had been a traditional offline course, I would have had to get all the texts translated into Braille at huge cost, then it can be time consuming to read them because I prefer to read electronically now, and you can't leave meaningful bookmarks or highlight sections of Braille easily.. There were a couple of articles which had been scanned straight in and not converted into text, so I had to get the tutor to re-do them properly for me, which added a bit of extra time but nothing too bad. I do wonder whether other students might have benefitted from having the text versions though, even just to be able to highlight, copy and paste bits for reference later. But anyway, a good experience, and we'll all get better at it as we learn together.
Justin's progress was significantly hindered in an observable way - quite simply he was unable to attend the course for a few weeks. His actual progress therefore was delayed by the same time period, although he made up time after he became more comfortable. As is clear in his 'Reflections' statement, he didn't feel substantially disadvantaged, and indeed doesn't come out in the setback levels as being the lowest scoring.
Discussions about accessibility eventually come down to visual impairments, and although this is hardly the full extent of accessibility, it is the most powerful display of how wrongly course materials can be presented in electronic form. Justin already has his assistive technology operating in place of his sight - he has become un-disabled as a result of the technology and experience with technology that he's had over the past few years. If he was a less amicable person, he might very well align the inaccessibility of the course software to being the equivalent of able-bodied people being locked out of Tesco for no reason. Given that he is in full control of the software, which complies with internationally agreed web standards, there is then a reasonable expectation that universities make efforts to provide their information in the same agreed format. That they don't, is a known and well-documented problem, and is endemic in every layer of the institutional system. However, in the UK, US, Australia, and many other nations, there are decade-old laws which prohibit this type of behaviour, and it is only a matter of time until someone more impassioned than Justin comes along and justly declares their rights. Out of all the students involved, this case applies responsibilities to more university departments/individuals than the others, yet the responsibility goes far beyond visual impairment and screen reader usage. For all students, simple - rather than complex - information is more understandable, and where possible, should be pursued as the desirable option.