JLoad: An Accessible Learning Object to Support Hearing Impaired in Learning Java Programming.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Statistical Geography, the Brazilian population is made up of more than 10 million people with hearing impairment. These people often face various barriers to getting a proper education. In teaching and learning programming, the use of environments that are not adapted for people with hearing impairments can make it difficult to understand iconography signs, textual instructions, and the degree of abstraction necessary for programming logic. This work proposes the JLoad (Java Learning Object to Assist the Deaf), aiming to support the hearing impaired in practical Java programming activities. JLoad works as a virtual programming laboratory, allowing collaboration between students and a tutor, asynchronously and remotely. We performed a comparative analysis between JLoad and Eclipse, a traditional tool, to assess its impact on people with hearing impairments in terms of motivation, performance, and usability in the execution of learning tasks. In all criteria, JLoad presented better averages and most of them were ratified by the statistical tests presenting significant differences, indicating a better performance of JLoad.