NCAM CD-ROM Access Guidelines

Students with disabilities are increasingly placed in inclusive classrooms where they learn alongside their peers. This poses a challenge to teachers and students because instructional materials may not be available in a form which is accessible to the disabled student. Inaccessible materials stigmatize children with disabilities by preventing them from using the same materials as their peers and can limit their educational opportunities. As technology becomes more prevalent in classrooms, students with disabilities face even more challenges in keeping pace with their classmates.

Publishers and educational software developers are increasingly aware that they must consciously include children with disabilities in their audience. Producing materials which are accessible will increase the publisher's reach by broadening the market to include students who have been excluded until now. Additionally, policies are now in place or are under consideration in several markets that make accessibility a requirement for electronic educational materials. However, few developers understand why access is a critical need or how to provide it in their products.

These guidelines represent an ambitious initiative to capture access challenges and solutions and present them in a format specifically designed to educate and assist educational software developers. The detailed guidelines, and solutions specific to math and science are unique to this document. This work is the result of a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation's Program for Persons with Disabilities. The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media developed this document with input from a distinguished board of advisors with expertise in accessible design, assistive technology, and the education of students with disabilities. Readers will find:

a basic understanding of the needs of users with different disabilities.
a summary of various approaches to serve users with different disabilities.
specific solutions for designing more accessible software.
guidelines with specific checkpoints and detailed techniques for implementation.

We hope that the information contained here will begin to address the need to create accessible software that includes images, multimedia, interactive activities, tables of data, graphs, and equations. Technical information covers common authoring environments (Microsoft Windows OS, Macintosh OS, the JavaÅ Platform, Macromedia Director, and the Web.) References to more detailed accessibility guidelines for most of these environments are provided.

Properly designed educational software can and must be accessible to students with disabilities. Developers who incorporate access solutions may find that these modifications bring benefits to the wider student population, as studies of multi-modal learning have shown. The principles of universal design, designing to meet the needs of as many users as possible, provide a new dimension for improving the usability of educational software for all students.