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Home  Access to the General Curriculum
Access to the General Curriculum for Students with Disabilities
While IDEA requires that students with disabilities have access to the general curriculum, adapting curricular materials to the needs of each student is often extremely difficult. In many instances, efforts to provide access come too late in the school year, leaving some students hopelessly behind.
Increasingly, schools are turning to universally designed digital materials and technologies to ensure that students who have sensory, cognitive, and physical disabilities have full access to the curriculum, rather than attempting to adapt non- accessible curricular materials. Universally designed technologies offer these children the ability to choose learning modes that best meet their diverse needs.
Students who do not have disabilities can also benefit from having alternatives available to them. Like curb cuts and books on tape, digital technologies with universal design features can help many different users, allowing each one to learn in a style that works for him or her. Furthermore, when schools purchase emerging technologies that are designed with access features built-in, the costs of providing access is spread over many students.
There is not yet an easy way to determine whether a product has been universally designed. Instead, it is important to ask whether the product or service is compatible with the leading accessibility guidelines, or contains specific accessibility features. For example, on a web-based product, librarians should ask whether the product is compliant with the W3C Accessibility Guidelines for HTML, XML, SMIL, CSS, and/or SVG. Multimedia is the combination of text, graphics, video, animation, and sound. Multimedia can be useful for many groups of learners, since a multi-modal presentation of information can be easier to understand. In general, users benefit when alternatives are available for each media type. Below is a list of key concerns for each media area to assist librarians in determining whether a product is universally designed:
- Text should be capable of being rendered on computer screens or other devices, translated into speech, and/or displayed on a refreshable Braille screen. Common text accessibility problems include hard-coded fonts that prevent users from changing style, size, or color; text presented with background images or poor contrast colors that hinder readability; text presented in an image format that screen readers cannot access and Braille displays cannot transform; and multi-column formats that screen readers cannot process correctly.
- Audio elements can add to the general appeal of online learning materials while making them more accessible to print- impaired learners. Common audio accessibility problems include lack of captions and/or transcripts; poor sound quality; and inability to control volume.
- Images can provide essential information, but are not accessible for users who are blind or have low vision. Common image accessibility problems include failure to provide alternate text and poor image resolution that restricts the ability of low-vision users to enlarge images.
Planning Accessible Libraries:
http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv02n4/article2.html
Web Junction:
http://webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=92
DO-IT:
http://www.washington.edu/doit/UA/PRESENT/libres.html
Accessible Textbooks Clearinghouse:
http://www.tsbvi.edu/textbooks/
RIT:
http://www.rit.edu/%7Eeasi/lib/oppo5.htm
Guidelines for Accessible Learning Applications:
http://ncam.wgbh.org/salt/guidelines/sec5.html
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