Introduction
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 that is accessible to the disabled student. Inaccessible materials stigmatize students 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, educational software programmers and Web site developers are increasingly aware that they must consciously include students with disabilities in their audience. Producing materials that are accessible will increase their 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. This document addresses both these points in detail.
These guidelines were first published in 2000 under the name Making Educational Software Accessible: Design Guidelines Including Math and Science Solutions. They represented an ambitious initiative to capture access challenges and solutions and present them in a format specifically designed to educate and assist educational software developers. This work was the result of a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation's Program for Persons with Disabilities.
In 1999, NCAM launched a four-year research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called Access to PIVoT (Physics Interactive Video Tutor). Funding for this collaboration was provided by the National Science Foundation's Program for Persons with Disabilities, and the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation (MEAF). PIVoT is a comprehensive on-line supplemental learning environment that augments MIT's introductory Newtonian physics class, one of the institute's most challenging freshman course offerings, even for students of MIT caliber. Using a sophisticated Web site and streaming digital video, PIVoT provides a unique 24-hour-a-day opportunity for students to conduct "virtual office hours" with the course's renowned physics professor, Walter Lewin. Students using PIVoT have access to a large amount of material ranging from a complete on-line textbook to a multimedia library containing a year's worth of lectures as well as dozens of tutorials centered around specific problems in the course. Non-MIT users may request a guest account at the PIVoT home page.
NCAM began the project by evaluating PIVoT for accessibility problems relating to multimedia, navigation, and the presentation of text, illustrations, graphs and tables. Project staff then worked with MIT to improve the accessibility of the PIVoT Web site through the use of accepted practices such as those detailed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 1.0 (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI). Other techniques were developed by NCAM and MIT staff specifically for PIVoT (e.g., extended audio descriptions). NCAM also trained MIT students to write captions and audio descriptions for the multimedia library and to write image descriptions for two of the textbook chapters.
The culmination of the Access to PIVoT project is this new set of guidelines, essentially an updated version of the original Making Educational Software Accessible guidelines. As in the original document, readers are given:
- 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.
To this list, the Access to PIVoT project has added:
- extensive information on making multimedia presentations accessible to deaf or blind students.
- examples of writing image descriptions for blind students.
- solutions for making forms and data tables accessible.
- information on making electronic and on-line textbooks accessible.
We hope that the information contained here will continue to address the need to create accessible software and Web sites which include images, multimedia, interactivity, data tables, graphs, and mathematical and scientific expressions.
Properly designed educational software and Web sites 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 multimodal 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 materials for all students.