Here you can find tools and guidelines to create accessible digital educational material.
However, you should be aware of the accessibility aspects of the different types of digital content. See: Accessible digital content.
A key issue in supporting integration or inclusion of students with disabilities and / or chronic diseases is participation in education and training.
Advice and support to students and education professionals on inclusive education, accessibility and adapted educational materials.
The most effective approach to know from where to start supporting your students and providing inclusive digital distance education is getting advice from people who work in this field. Professionals of the digital accessibility world and social inclusion and those who work for (student) supporting organisations are the ones that know the tips and tricks for providing inclusive education. It is advisable to do so because no silver bullet method suits your local regulations, educational context and student-specific needs.
JAWS, Job Access With Speech, is the world’s most popular screen reader, developed for computer users whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse.
JAWS provides speech and Braille output for the most popular computer PC applications. It assists Internet navigation, text writing and reading, email management and presentations creation from office software, remote desktop, among others.
NVDA allows blind and vision impaired people to access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party applications.
Major highlights include:
Assistive Technologies (ATs) are those that help people to perform daily activities. Here, we focus on the most used ATs in digital education like the ones for reading digital texts.
Web accessibility is crucial in digital education, as it lays the groundwork for creating inclusive digital resources, including office documents, PDFs, and EPUBs, by adhering to accessibility standards and best practices. Additionally, a significant number of educational applications rely on web technologies or are integrated within websites. As university staff, it is important to understand and implement web accessibility to provide an inclusive and accessible digital education experience for all students.
The Learning Management Systems (LMS) provides means for efficient student and course management. Among other functions, the LMS makes available to students the course materials, assessments and communication tools therefore, they play a key role in ensuring equal opportunities. LMSs should not be limited to be accessible but also they should support the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) by CAST in order to create an inclusive environment.