An interactive web-based tool that guides K-12 districts to become more inclusive learning spaces for students with disabilities. Building background knowledge about accessible educational materials (AEM), conducting self-assessments, and monitoring continuous progress are all facilitated by the AEM Pilot. If your district has work to do to improve the accessibility of the materials and technologies provided to learners with disabilities, take off with the AEM Pilot!

AEM Pilot

When it comes to making content more accessible, small changes can have a significant impact! By following these tips, you will promote access to information as a first step toward reducing barriers and addressing variability, thus promoting inclusive learning environments!

This resource from CAST's National Center on Accessible Educational Materials provides helpful guidelines for making your video and audio media accessible. In particular, it reviews the use and inclusion of captions for videos and transcriptions for audio files.

Many of the same accessibility best practices that apply to a document (meaningful links, good color contrast, alternative text for images) are relevant to the design of an accessible presentation. However, the unique layout of a presentation requires a few additional supports to ensure everyone can navigate the content.

Microsoft Office products now have an accessibility checker that can be used to identify the most common accessibility issues. However, this checker is not perfect, and it should only be used as a starting point for improving the accessibility of your documents. The checker can be helpful in pointing you to the issues that need the most attention in a given document, but you still need to have an understanding of accessibility best practices to properly address those issues.

The explosion of Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) made possible by technologies, materials and manipulatives creates a UDL pathway to using multiple representations of the same object to meet the needs of varying student populations and learning preferences for different attributes; possibly at the same time. Educators have become aware that they can cross over exceptionalities to use materials, manipulatives, and technologies to meet the needs of general education, special education, gifted, sighted, and visually impaired students, etc. In this resource, a modified version of Jerome Bruner’s mathematical Concrete to Abstract theory is used as a mnemonic device to provide an organizational structure for a variety of science materials. This concrete pictorial abstract (CPA) model can be generalized to other subject areas.

The explosion of Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) made possible by technologies, materials, and manipulatives creates a UDL pathway to using multiple representations of the same object to meet the needs of varying student populations and learning preferences at the same time. Educators have become aware that they can cross over exceptionalities to use materials, manipulatives, and technologies to meet the needs of general education, special education, gifted, sighted, visually impaired students, etc. In this resource, a modified version of Jerome Bruner’s mathematical Concrete to Abstract theory is used as a mnemonic device to provide an organizational structure for a variety of science materials. 

Educational materials, one of the four components of a UDL curriculum, must be accessible to students with disabilities if every learner is expected to make progress in the general curriculum. Successful provision of accessible educational materials (AEM) requires comprehensive and collaborative processes for purchasing, selecting, and creating commercial, open, and educator created materials for learning. Key factors can guide educators in setting up such a system, including compliance, timely delivery, written guidelines, professional learning opportunities, data collection, data use, and allocation of resources. This resource explores the Quality Indicators for the Provision of AEM, including a tool that curriculum and procurement teams can use for continuous self-assessment and progress monitoring.