Recommendations for Improving Edovo's Web App

The Digital Equity Act recognizes digital literacy and digital inclusion as core enablers of improved health, education, employment, economic, social, and civic outcomes for underserved populations such as incarcerated individuals. Edovo's market-leading reach inside custodial institutions, coupled with their mission to provide digital eduction, vocation, and rehabilitation content to incarcerated individuals, gives them an unparalleled opportunity to improve incarcerated individuals' outcomes by increasing digital literacy and inclusion.

Indeed, for many incarcerated individuals, Edovo is their best--or only--source of digital content and practice.

However, mere technical access to digital content is not sufficient to increase digital literacy and inclusion. Rather, manifesting these goals requires meaningful access to relevant content using applications that enable and encourage incarcerated individuals to practice and master digital skills. This article outlines opportunities for Edovo to improve their web app so that it more effectively promotes the goals of the Digital Equity Act and their own mission.

One key component of meaningful access is the discoverability of content. Discoverability is a measure of the ease or difficulty with which a user can locate content that meets her information needs by means of a search query containing relevant keywords. Discoverability is determined by two factors: whether or not the content and its metadata are designed using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices and the design of the information retrieval (search) system used to locate the content. Edovo content is not easily discoverable because its full text is not indexed, its metadata (titles and descriptions) are rarely designed using SEO best practices, and the search system used to locate it lacks key features such as faceted, full-text search, relevant search snippets, and a navigable and featureful search results page that facilitates discoverability.

Edovo has the opportunity to drastically improve the discoverability of their content by designing and recommending SEO best practices for the titles and descriptions of their content and making crucial improvements to their search system. Moreover, Edovo has the opportunity to improve the discoverability of their content by teaming with content partners and incarcerated users to author and host specific subject matter library guides that curate, describe, and steer users to relevant content.

A second key component of meaningful access is the usability of content. Usability is a measure of the ease or difficulty with which a user can consume the content in a manner that facilitates mastering the knowledge and skills embedded in the content. Usability is determined by the design of the document and its metadata and the affordances made available by the features of the user agent used to view the content. To promote usability, a PDF reader must contain key features that facilitate active learning such as nonlinear navigation, annotations, bookmarks, and highlighting. Edovo's PDF reader contains none of these features and, as a result, their PDF content is not easily usable.

Edovo has the opportunity drastically improve the usability of their PDF content by making crucial improvements to their PDF reader.

In addition to improving the discoverability and usability of Edovo content, the recommended search and PDF reader features would be key contributors to incarcerated users' digital literacy. In order to contribute to digital literacy, an app must enable and encourage users to practice and master transferable digital skills. That is, digital skills that he will be required to use upon release. For this reason, apps should use industry standard features, user interface elements, and workflows. Moreover, to contribute to digital literacy, an app cannot discourage its use by way of buggy or frustrating features that increase friction.

While the recommended search and PDF features are a good place to start when considering how to improve the digital literacy utility of the Edovo web app, they are no place to end. The Edovo app contains numerous non-standard and onerous features, user interface elements, and workflows and lacks critical standard usability and accessibility features. The latter is due in great part to the featureless, bespoke webview-based user agents used by incarcerated individuals to access Edovo.

Edovo has the opportunity to drastically improve its web app's ability to enable and encourage users to practice and master digital skills and, in turn, consume its content, by integrating these crucial missing features (e.g., user style sheets, content zooming, bookmarking, and tabbed browsing) into the web app itself.

Finally, Edovo also has the opportunity to increase the quantity and quality of its content by implementing a SCORM importer in order to easily import a wealth of available openly licensed courses; increasing the number of openly licensed textbooks it hosts; and collaborating with incarcerated users to design and host openly licensed content specific to the custodial context that is not available elsewhere.

By collaborating with incarcerated individuals to seize these opportunities, Edovo will be able to more effectively promote the laudable goals of the Digital Equity Act and their own mission to improve outcomes for their incarcerated users and their families.