Education
For Families
Standards For Accessible Educational Software
As more students with disabilities are placed in classes with their non-disabled peers, publishers and educational software developers are increasingly aware that they must include children with disabilities in their audience. Producing accessible materials will increase the publisher's reach by broadening the market to include students with disabilities.
In 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 standards for accessible software for use in a math and science curriculum. These guidelines attempted to present solutions to access challenges 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.
For example, tools for graphing and solving equations in mathematics allow students today to approach math from an entirely new perspective, learning constructively rather than memorizing algorithms. But if blind students cannot use the software that makes such an exploration possible, they will not have the same valuable learning experiences that other students have. A student with a hearing impairment may be unable to hear instructions for a lesson, which are given only in audio, and therefore have no way to begin the assignment.
The project developed guidelines and checkpoints to make educational software more accessible:
- Provide access to images for users who are blind or visually impaired.
- Allow images and screen layouts to be printed.
- Provide text equivalents for still images that convey educational content.
- Provide tactile graphics or three-dimensional models for images.
- Provide access to multimedia presentations for users with sensory disabilities.
- Add audio description to multimedia presentations.
- Add closed captions to multimedia presentations.
- Provide access to interactive activities for all users with disabilities.
- Ensure that all actions can be completed from the keyboard.
- Present information in ways that are accessible to both blind and deaf users.
- Allow users to customize any timing of events.
- Provide features that allow users to access multiple sources of information separately when they are delivered simultaneously.
- Provide a simpler version of any screen with complex backgrounds.
- Provide access to data in tables for all users with disabilities.
- Design all HTML-based tables in accordance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative.
- Ensure access to HTML-based tables in accordance with User Agent Accessibility Guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative, or the interaction of a stand-alone user agent with tables.
- Provide equivalent access to data presented in tables not produced in HTML.
- Provide access to graphs for users who are blind or visually impaired.
- Allow all graphs to be printed.
- Allow all graphs to be enlarged on screen.
- Allow users to control the width of lines and characteristics of fonts for viewing and printing graphs.
- Provide a complete description in text for static graphs.
- Provide summary information about dynamic graphs.
- Provide alternate formats for graphs.
- Provide access to math equations for all users with disabilities.
- Allow all equations to be enlarged on screen.
- Ensure that users with visual impairments can read equations and those users with visual impairments and with physical impairments can write questions.
Publishers who include solutions in educational software, such as the guidelines suggested above, will find that these modifications bring benefits to the wider student population. For more information about this project and the guidelines and implementation suggestions, go to: http://ncam.wgbh.org/cdrom/guideline/index.html
Source: Family Center on Technology and Disability