Accessible Digital Media Guidelines -Educational Issues for Students with Disabilities

Properly designed e-books, software, Web sites and learning management systems can and must be accessible to all users with disabilities. Technology is prevalent everywhere, and learners of all ages and in all fields require equal access to content to keep pace with their colleagues and classmates. Whether they are high school students, IT professionals or research chemists, inaccessible materials prevent people with disabilities from using the same materials at the same time as their peers, and can limit their educational and career opportunities.

The principles of universal design — designing to meet the needs of as many users as possible — provide a new dimension for improving the usability of electronic materials for everyone. Producing accessible materials will increase their reach by broadening the market to include people who have been previously excluded. Developers who incorporate access solutions may also find that these modifications bring benefits to the general population, not just users with disabilities, as studies of multimodal learning have shown.

Moreover, publishers, educational-software programmers and Web-site developers are increasingly aware that they must consciously include people with disabilities in their audiences. Policies are now in place or are under consideration in many markets that make accessibility a requirement for distributing electronic materials. If the materials necessary for the job or the classroom are delivered electronically, publishers would be wise to design them so people with disabilities can utilize them. And more and more learning content is delivered electronically as nearly every higher education institution, some K-12 schools and many corporations have adopted learning management system (LMS) software, which organizes and delivers digital materials for on-line courses. However, few developers understand why access is critical or how to provide it in their products.

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