Remote Moderated and Unmoderated Evaluation by Users with Visual Disabilities of an Online Registration and Authentication System for Health Services

Online registration and authentication is becoming increasingly important, yet registration and authentication systems are typically developed without considering the needs of people with disabilities, particular visual disabilities. We now face an additional challenge that evaluating systems with users has become impossible in face-to-face situations due to the coronavirus pandemic, so remote evaluations become more important. This paper presents a remote evaluation with visually disabled users of the registration and authentication process for online health services in the UK. Two methods of remote evaluation were compared: moderated evaluation in which the researcher and participant worked together via Microsoft Teams; and unmoderated evaluation in which the participant worked by themselves and recorded their session for later analysis by the researcher. This paper concentrates on the issues of the remote evaluation methods, rather than the results of the accessibility of the registration and authentication process, which will be reported later. A number of problems and some surprising strengths of remote evaluation with visually disabled participants are discussed, as well as some differences between moderated and unmoderated remote evaluation.