We are developing a mathematics course for grade 2 students and thinking about accessibility raises lots of questions such as how hard it will be to provide full support?, how it can be implemented? and much more. I agree it’s difficult to make resources availble to children with special needs but it’s not impossible. “The only disability is when people cannot see human potential” said by Debra Run, I think it’s very important for us as an instructor to understand such needs and help as much as we can. Being so advance with technology, we can use such cutting edge technologies to make it more accessible. As lower level mathematics is base, it’s very crucial for student to understand it properly and only then higher level mathematics will be easy for them to understand. In this post I will be explaining way in which we can make it more accessible, it hard to cover all cases but the plan is, we can make it available to student with hearing or vision problems and if we get another special request we can work in it.
Thinking about this reminds me the situation my cousin faced. when he was a kid, he was not getting admission in any of the local schools, the reason because he is visually impaired. He and his family faced really hard time convincing school to give him admission, at last they found a school which allowed my aunt to be in class with my cousin to understand what instructor is explaining and then after going home my aunt reached my cousin. For assignments, project and exams, my cousin will explain to aunt and then she writes everything for him. This incident is from late 90’s when technology was not so advance, now a days he uses screen reader and speech-to-text softwares for academics purposes. Similarly, I was thinking to provide resources for softwares that will be required to succeed in this course for visually impaired students. Also, whenever the content is in a form of video, we will try to speak each and every thing that we have in slides or we write.For students who have hearing problems, we can have captions available on the videos and for the activity purposes we can provide resources for speech-to-text software and using that they can read what others are speaking in a group. I am aware that, its hard for kid with this age to understand the text but that’s the best I could think of. Also student can understand form visuals such as how additions are done.
