Accessible Educational Materials
Accessible instructional materials (or accessible educational materials) are instructional materials that have been formatted or adapted to meet the individual needs of students with disabilities. The definition of instructional materials in Florida includes hardbacked or softbacked textbooks, electronic content, consumables, learning laboratories, manipulatives, electronic media, and computer courseware or software that serve as the basis for instruction for each student in the core courses of mathematics, language arts, social studies, science, reading, and literature.
There are three areas of personalization that should be considered.
- Content
- information
- language
- reading level
- Structure
- flow of information
- layout
- amount of information (chunking)
- Presentation
- print/digital print
- braille and use with a refreshable braille display
- audio
- graphics/symbolated text
- manipulatives
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends four principles of accessibility as guidelines for ensure that all materials, and particularly digital materials are usable by individuals with disabilities. These principles are:
- Content must be perceivable
by each user.
- User interface components in the content must be operable
by each user.
- Content and controls must be understandable
to each user.
- Content must be robust enough to work with current and future technologies
(including assistive technologies).
IDEA 2004 established the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) and requires LEAs to provide accessible materials to students who qualify as being print disabled due to a visual, physical, or organic based reading disability. Through this system core curriculum textbooks are available in specialized formats (Braille, audio, digital etext, large print). For more information in Florida visit NIMAS/Florida at
http://www.fimcvi.org/