Ensuring MaTerials Work For All LEarnERs
Create Accessible Experiences
Learners should have materials presented in a format that allows them access using their abilities and with the support of technology. Educators can help learners achieve their own goals by finding, creating, converting, and providing materials that work for everyone, regardless of ability.
What Makes An Educational Material Accessible?
Enjoy the video summary of accessibility for digital learning materials!
People are diverse. Needs vary from person to person. The key to ensuring accessibility is understanding that people use different senses to interact with the materials. Each part of educational material (text, pictures, video, audio, etc) needs to be presented in a way that someone could use any modality at any given time.
Multiple Modalities Is Key
Text can be heard.
Images can be heard.
How Do People Without Disabilities Benefit from Accessible Materials?
People Can Choose
What Works Best For Them
Everyone is different. At any given time, any given individual might find using a different modality or multiple modalities helps them learn. Ever been tired and just wish you could read the text with your ears rather than your eyes? Ever tried to watch a video but the dialogue was garbled or the accent was too thick so you turned on the captions? If materials are made accessible, people can choose which modality works best for them in the moment based on personal preference.
Enjoy the video summarizing the importance of accessibility!
Additional Resources
How Do I Find Educational Materials That Work For Everyone?
The most efficient way to provide accessible educational materials to students is to find materials that are already created that way! Why create them yourself when someone has already done the work for you? LCPS works to ensure curricular materials that are provided as resources to educators, are already accessible. When reviewing materials, educators can ask themselves a series of design questions to determine if the materials are accessible.
Additional Resources
How Do I Create Educational Materials That work For Everyone?
Most educators do not have a background in designing and creating educational materials with accessibility in mind. That's okay! No one expects you to be an expert.
Create educational materials whatever way works best for you. A final step in the process is to check that material for accessibility.
Use an Accessibility Checker
An accessibility checker will catch your design mistakes and guide you through a process on how to fix them before you share it with students. Using the accessibility checker consistently will help you learn how to design the next material with less errors. You'll learn from your mistakes and begin to anticipate what you'll need to do to mitigate errors!
Grackle is an accessibility checker already installed on Google Chrome for every educator in LCPS.
Additional Resources
how Do I Convert Educational Materials So They Work for Everyone?
Read&Write for Windows is just one tool that can be used convert materials so they are accessible.
There are times when an educator finds a material that would be useful as an instructional resource to help guide the learning of a student but is, unfortunately, not accessible. Technology can be used to convert inaccessible materials into something that works for everyone!
Optical Character RecogNition
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a function of technology that converts inaccessible text into something that can be read aloud by a text to speech reader. LCPS provides two primary tools with OCR capabilities.
Read&Write for Windows
Additional Resources
How To Install Read&Write for Windows (LCPS Employees Only)
How Do I Help Students Create Accessible Materials For Everyone?
Learn Today How To DEsign For A More Inclusive Tomorrow
Students are making meaningful contributions to the world right now! One way they are doing so is through the creation of content meant to be consumed by others in their community or for the public around the world. If a student learns now that their materials should be created with accessibility in mind, they'll bring that expectation and know-how with them into the future with every ensuing piece of content they create. Adding accessibility considerations to rubrics as a design parameter for products they are creating helps learners understand the need, expectation, and benefits.
Who Can Help Me LEarn how to Find, Create, Convert, and Share Accessible Materials For Everyone?
Provision of accessible materials is an important part of adopting an inclusive mindset and designing educational experiences for everyone. Ensuring materials shared with students are accessible, however, does not necessarily mean the entire educational experience is designed inclusively. Designing the entire educational experience, including the materials provided, with flexibility in mind is how to ensure the diverse needs of learners are met.
Adopt An Inclusive Mindset
Educators questing to learn more about inclusive design have ample resources available. Beyond websites, videos, podcasts, and social media connections, educators can collaborate with other professionals in LCPS who can provide support, ideas, resources, short cuts, feedback, insights, and confidence.
Some individuals who can provide this support include the Specialized Instructional Facilitators - Assistive Technology.