Accessibility in OER Fall 2022

In the State of Maine, we have a system of local control in regards to curriculum and curricular materials so there are no specific materials mandated or provided by the Department of Education. This provides a lot of freedom to schools/districts but it also means that they are responsible for navigating the systems to produce or procure materials and technologies that are accessible for their students. 

We have an organization in the State (Maine AEM) that helps teachers and families understand how to access/purchase AEM and how to advocate for their use whenever materials are purchased. This organization is the one that the Maine Department of Education refers people to for assistance directly from their website.

In our MOOSE project (Maine Online Opportunities for Sustained Education) we have been focusing on creating free/open-source, accessible materials for students both through universal design and the physical platform we are working with and building. We hope that this academy will be another step up in our capacity to teach other educators to create their own AEM and to be able to advance our own execution of AEM on the MOOSE platform.

This answer applies for the rest of the Maine MOOSE team members (Stephanie, Jaime, Andrew, and Bri) given our shared context but they may have other things to add to this learning as well! 

In the state of Oregon, the district is responsible for providing AEM to their students. However, Oregon does have specific policies related to AEM that must be adhered to (OAR 581-011-0052, OAR 581-015-2060, OAR 51-022-2355, ORS 337.120). All basal instructional materials used in Oregon K-12 public schools must comply with the most current NIMAS specifications regarding AEM. 

Many districts utilize third-party services, such as the Oregon Textbook and Media Center or Bookshare, that provide textbooks and supplementary materials in accessible formats in order to meet individual student needs on the local level.

How are students in your state or district provided AEM? Does your state or district provide related guidelines or procedures? 

In our District, we are fortunate to have a Technology Levy that has funded our 1:1 initiative. Most students (Gr 2 - transition program) use PCs, while Pre-K & K-1 students have access to iPads. As a result, there are many accessibility features of the universal tools that support access to AEM. We also have a district-wide license for Learning Ally, which has been implemented in such a way that building-based staff "own" the tool, which means more access for eligible students. That said, we have a ways to go when providing additional AEM, and increasing access for all. 

For those who need assistive technology, we have additional supports - like a "trial" Library of equipment, a loose process for requesting items we don't already have, and my role as support for the whole process - from considerations to evaluating outcomes. That said, I'm a part-time employee for a population of nearly 12K students, so it's a challenge to meet the needs.

As for alternative formats: I'm still fairly new to our system, but I'd say that if a student needed something from a NIMAS source file it would require teamwork. I just became our district admin for Bookshare and I see it's been underutilized for a long time. Hoping to work on that!

We do not have any set guidelines for accessiblity during curriculm adoption. We've had conversations, but as far as I know nothing in writing to guide these decisions. 

As for creating materials, we have a diverse array of skills. We are also lucky to have instructional technology coaches in every building. I've done some outreach on accessibility tools and strategies with this group, hoping it'll have a trickle down effect. And everyone learned a tremendous amount during remote learning. However, we still see some common workflows that create more barriers, e.g., taking a screen shot of text and pasting into OneNote (which seems to inconsistenly OCR).

I have not reached out to our State's Instructional Materials Center, but I am aware that we have a state rep at the WA School for the Blind in Vancouver, WA. I haven't had the need to contact them personally, but I do work closely with another member of that organization - a technology specialist. 

My impression of our district's ability to provide AEM at this point is that there are pockets of experts who are skilled at finding ways to make materials more accessible, find variety in formats, and understand more options of delivery of information. 

In my position as librarian, I work on providing a variety of formats of literature and information resources as well as accessibility in standardized tests. It is my job to teach students and staff how to access our online tools and their accessibility features such as text-to-speech, reading level adjustment, visual adjustment etc. I feel comfortable teaching around the tools are known to me but I know there are many more out there that I need to learn about.

I'm looking forward to learning more about Bookshare, American Printing House, and our state Instructional Materials Center.

As a Higher Education institution (Frederick Community College) there is no state or district-wide coordinator, that I know of, that helps faculty gain access to AEM. Most commerical textbooks are accessible and that is one of the many reasons facutly like and continue to use them. The work has been done by the publisher, and students are responsible for buying the resources. 

For other course materials it is up to the faculty member to make sure they are meeting the accessiblity requirements for any accommodation plans they receive. Some facutly find they have to do a lot of work at the last minute because they were not expecting to need accessible materials until a week before classes start they learning a student with an accomodation plan that requires those types of materials will be in their class. 

We do have a Disability Access Services office that creates accomodation plans, includes accessiblity technology, and hires scribes and interpretors for those students who need them, but they are not responsible for providing services or resouces to make materials accessible. They will provide some professional development for faculty around accessbility, but the majority of their focus is on students. 

The College does have the ALLY building block in our LMS system (Blackboard) which allows faculty to see if the content they have created themselves (PowerPoints, Word docs, etc) are accessible. And there has been a push to try and make faculty start with accessbility in mind when they are looking at the resources they want to use rather than trying to retrofit once the need arises. 

Expanding on Colleen's comments, I would say that institutions within the University System of Maryland (most of the 4-yr public universities in the state) are similiar to Frederick Community College, though LMS systems will vary. Some of our institutions have accessibility experts housed within instructional design and technology units; at others, there will be more reliance on a disability support services office, though as with FCC, those offices have students as their primary focus. The Kirwan Center recently hosted a systemwide convening on Digital Accessibility as a way to start a conversation across institutions about the need to move from an "accommodation" mindset (after the fact) to an "accessibility" mindset (accessibility built in from the outset). Our colleagues at the University of Maryland, College Park have done a lot of work on this - https://itaccessibility.umd.edu/.

At The University of Baltimore, faculty receive a notice from the Office of Disability and Access Services that outlines a students needs.  Faculty can chose to proactively create accessible content, but are not required to do so until a student registers with the ODAS, and then the faculty are only required to meet the accomodations required for the student.  To move to a proactive UDL approach, we rely on faculty to connect with university instructional designers, but the ID recommendations are not requirements. 

ODAS does offer a list of links out to resources if faculty chose to pursue accessibility versus accomodations (re: Nancy's post)

In Brazil, as far as I am concerned, unfortunately procedures and guidelines related to accessible educational materials do not seem to be so clear as it is in the US. For instance, even though we have the Berenice Piana Law that ensures education in regular schools to children with ASD and allows them to have a teacher to create an individual support plan with specific materials, things get harder when it comes to practice.
Several schools tend to avoid the use of AEM because it would imply the creation of plans that can help children with ASD or other disabilities to hone their skills, due to a mix between a closed mindset and precarious infrastructure, while some other institutions try their best to meet the students' needs, creating materials that are related to evidence-based practices, reliable theory and teachers who are trying to abide by the law.  However, the specific guidelines for the creation of materials and how to apply them are still very incipient, and the schools that ensure accessible education rely mostly on international sources to meet the students' needs. 

 

Districts in Oregon are responsible for procuring and providing AEM. They utilize Bookshare, in addition to the Oregon Textbook and Media Center and Blind Visually Impaired Student fund for braille and large print. There is state guidance. Districts have local control. As a current AEM Cohort state, we are developing a database of resources to support procurement, creation and provision to students with documented disabilities, and all learners. We are developing a template for district guidance that entails these processes. They are not consistent across the state.   

At our institution, the Center for Academic Success and Achievement with the Educational Technology Office, procures materials and converts materials to an accessible format. CASA would also connect students to organizations like Bookshare.

Through the Intermediate Unit, teachers have been provided with trainings and meetings where we are given guidance on how to utilize AEM. 

Through my district, it seems we that the Special Education teachers are the ones to provide teachers with the AEM when it is deemed necessary for a student. Teachers may be using them on their own in their classrooms and not discussing it though. 

PaTTAN, PA Traning and Technical Assistance Network, runs a statewide AIM department: PaTTAN - AIM Center.  They also provide links for the acquisition of materials through federal quota funds.  

I host a lending library for AT at our Intermediate Unit and I help others acquire needed items for trial through the state PaTTAN library and our State AT Act Program - TechOWL.

A lot of my work, though, centers on ensuring that there are accessible materials that have options from the start!  

Andrea, can you say more about the lending library?  Are materials available through ILLiad or OCLC Worldcat for ILL from other institutions or this in house use only?

Hi Kristin!  My Assistive Technology library is available to member districts of our Intermediate Unit only.  Every state, though, has an AT Act Program that typically has a lending library - State/Territory AT Programs - AT3 Center.

Whoa, thank you for the prompt respose with a great resource/link.  It does make me think about states that are less well funded or supported and how states with more resources/better staffing could support states with similar (or greater) needs.  Thinking about how in our university system, the libraries coordinate who purchases what resources, then we share out those resources within the larger system.  Reducing duplicates so small budgets can support the acquisition of unique materials. 

I’ll speak to this from the lens of grants and contracts that include works for hire. It is important to our organiztion that all of these work products are accessible because whether the product is intended for students, educators, families, or community members we want to ensure that everyone in our state has full access to the content.

One way that we have approached this is through embedding language in our contracts and agreements that requires that resulting work products are accessible and compliant with the WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines. However, not all entities are familiar with these standards and accessibility guidelines. When we are preparing to work with contractors or grantees, it is best practice to ensure that we provide training around what it means to meet these standards in order to ensure that the products we receive are fully accessible. Depending on the work products we anticipate and the entities that we are working with, this might mean providing access to asynchronous training resources or guides, or it might mean full synchronous training that gives people opportunities to try things out and ask questions in real time.  

Our organization has invested in learning about accessibility and has required that all of our staff learn how to make the documents that we publish accessible. We are still learning alongside many of the contractors and grantees that we work with. I hope to continue growing my skills in creating accessible content, as well as learning how to better support others in learning to create accessible content.

 Our district is currently 1:1 (I-pads K-2, chromebooks 3-12), and at the middle level, we utilize many online curricular materials - most of our curricula is fully online (for math and science, we don’t even have textbooks anymore) - because of this, we have many general accessibility options available for our students. We have apps that can read aloud to students, talk-to-text opportunities for typing, and our state-mandated testing is now fully online as well with many accessibility option for students.   

While I can’t say we don’t have policies in place regarding accessibility, I couldn't find one. 

The special education staff uses things like BookShare as well as Newsela and Readworks, where lexile can be selected so that text is accessible to students at multiple reading levels, and we teach students how to enlarge text, switch to dark mode, and use the general listening and viewing tools available on the chromebooks.  

I have found that typically we’re more of a ‘oh snap, we need to make this accessible!’ district at the moment than a ‘make sure things are accessible from the start’ district, but that’s why we’re here!

As far as I know, Pennsylvania has Accessible Instructional Materials through PaTTAN. As for our district, we are 1:1 chromebooks and ipads (for the younger grades).

I am not certain where our district is officially. Honestly, we seem to be a bit more reactive than proactive, in my opinion. So, hoping we bring back knowledge and resources to move us forward. 

In Washington State, we have some state guidance recommending districts consider accessibility when selecting and purchasing curriculum content.  However, the main responsibility falls with individual school districts to make sure individual students who need AEM under law receive accessible content.  In our larger school districts, we have increased our number of AT specialists and awareness of the need for AEM so good progress is being made in building relationships with curriculum and IT departments to look at accessibility of all materials.  Also, most large districts have a person who assure websites are accessible according to WCAG.  However, there is still alot of disparity between larger districts and smaller more rural districts with less funding and staff to address these issues.  Bookshare is fairly widely used for qualifying students and we even have some districts who contract with Learning Ally as well as having district owned digital libraries through Overdrive Marketplace.  

Colorado is a local control state, so specific curriculum decisions are set at the district level. We also have regional Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) which provide shared special education services since we have many smaller rural districts which share some specialized staff and resources. Each district with their curriculum choices have to take into account AEM themselves. Many districts opt to use funds for commercially available curriculum resources which do tend to provide a baseline for AEM resources - integrated screen readers/test to speech, differentiation guidelines for up/down leveling and language. But they focus on the basic assebility categories. If schools do not adopt a comprehensive curriculum with integrated AEM the job of making resources accesible falls largely on the classroom teacher or special educaition teachers to adapt or supplement. Access to technology varies widely in CO schools, from schools where each student is assigned a quality computer or tablet, to schools where the teacher is lucky to have a working classroom PC. If technology is needed for AEM to function typically and IEP will specify this and an effort will be made to meet those needs, but sometimes it can be difficult to get that written into a plan if resources are scarce in a district.  

Oklahoma is a Local Control state and although the State Approved Textbooks are reviewed and require accessibility during adoption AEM can still be very hard to obtain.  Schools are tasked with providing AEM for any resources that they choose to use and deploy. Unfortunately I often hear how the schools are not providing the AEM at the same time as peers. 

I recently did a PD day and was asked how to make online program usable for a dyslexic who needed read aloud assistance. The major organization has a statement of accessibility and says they are making effort to make products for all learns. It then goes on to instructions to help student who are blind or have a color blindness but not other disabilities.  We are through the 1st quarter and student in still in limbo waiting on others and can't complete work independently. This is not an unusual story for me sadly as an advocate. 

Our teachers are creating some amazing things but AEM from the start is not in the front of their mind. Unless they a have connected with a specific student who had a specific need accessibility comes as a second thought. 

Our Oklahoma AbleTech is an amazing resources but so many of our teachers still don't know about them.  Our schools for the blind and deaf are great to provide support to our schools for students with those needs. 

Bookshare is an amazing sources that our schools are not utilizing for all students who should have access.  

I am new to my role in the Utah State Board of Education, so I am still learning what is available. However, I was a former teacher and tech coach in a district at the state, and we had access to devices, coaches, and software that was used to support diverse learners. 

For example, many schools at the secondary level are currently 1:1, and they are able to take their Chromebooks home and either expand their knowleddge on a topic or learn at their own pace and place. 

I defer to my team member Andrea Zern on this!  She is so knowledgeble!