AccessISL

There are many strategies that can be used to make programming more accessible to students with various types of disabilities. For example:

The U.S. Department of Justice's Guide to Disability Rights Laws lists and summarizes the content of key federal legislation to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities. It includes information about the Americans with Disabilities Act, Telecommunications Act, Fair Housing Act, Air Carrier Access Act, National Voter Registration Act, Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Rehabilitation Act, and Architectural Barriers Act. It also includes links to additional resources.

Quorum is an evidence-based programming language. It is designed to be accessible to everyone, in particular to individuals who are blind and use a screen reader technology. It is used by many schools for the blind to teach programming.

Find more about Quorum on the Quorum website and/or view the video Quorum: An Accessible Programming Language. Try programming yourself by following one of the Quorum tutorials.

A speech-to-text service is an accommodation that can be used by a student who is deaf or hard-of-hearing as a way to gain access to spoken or auditory content. With speech-to-text services, a provider listens to a speaker and then produces text for the person who is deaf or hard-of-hearing to read on a computer screen, TV monitor, or projection screen. Speech-to-text service is often called real-time captioning, and the providers are often referred to as captionists or transcribers.

Yes, there are funds available specifically for producing captioning. While the U.S. Department of Education is still a major source of caption funding, a good deal of captioning today is made possible by corporate support. Corporate contributions supplement or match those allotted by a program's producer and its distributor (i.e., the broadcast or cable network or syndicator).

Following the basic design guidelines listed below can help you create overhead visuals that are easily read by people of many different ages and abilities to read and see. Large print and well-organized visual aids are particularly helpful for some students with disabilities that affect their sight, learning, or hearing.

The Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 required that television sets with screens 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the United States must have built-in closed-caption decoder circuitry that allows viewers to display closed captions on their sets. Closed captioning is technology that provides visual text to describe dialogue, background noise, and sound effects in television programming. The deadline for compliance with this act was July 1993.

Yes, there are many web browsers that include special features for use by individuals with disabilities.

Several websites provide comprehensive information about making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) accessible to students with disabilities. They include:

To accommodate students with low vision, use large print for text and handouts. While size will depend upon the needs of the individual, large print is usually defined as 16 to 18 point bold type depending on the typeface used. A standard Roman typeface, using upper and lower cases, is more readable than italicized, oblique, or condensed fonts. To enlarge print from standard 12 point original text to 16-18 point, use a 150-165% enlargement setting on a copier or printer.

Additional ways to accommodate students with low vision include: