High-stakes assessments can be made accessible to students with print disabilities, providing an opportunity for students to show their mastery of the subject matter, not to struggle with technology issues, subpar image descriptions, or incomplete markup.
Abstract
Access to high-stakes assessments for students with print disabilities requires high-quality alternatives for images that provide access without giving away the answers. It's also vital that all accommodations are available to assistive technology to ensure that each student's access to the test is smooth and unhindered.
The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH (NCAM) will provide an overview and lessons learned from its efforts to level playing field for students with print disabilities and online assessments.
In the past year, NCAM's accessible assessment editors have written 10,000 image descriptions for high stakes assessments. In addition, NCAM has developed research-based guidelines for making images and assessments accessible and helped to shape the Guidelines for Accessibility of Assessments Project (GAAP) which created comprehensive audio accommodation guidelines for the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments.
Kepoints
Considerations for making digital assessments accessible for students with print disabilities.
How some high-stakes assessments are striving to be more accessible.
Free resources and professional development available.
Speaker Bio(s)
Bryan Gould
Bryan Gould, WGBH/NCAM Director of Accessible Learning and Assessment Technologies.
Bryan has been conducting blindness-related research and development projects for over 20 years at WGBH. His projects range from improving access to complex scientific images and high-stakes assessments to amusement park rides and smart phone apps. Bryan’s multiple published guidelines, most notably the STEM Image Description Guidelines, have been adopted by many educational publishers and accessibility organizations and he regularly conducts training sessions on how best to present images, video, and digital experiences to meet the needs of people with visual and print disabilities. Bryan is expert in writing image description for alt text and audio description for video.