All of the AT solutions in the world are useless if they can't provide information to the student. Traditionally, higher education has focused most of its "accessibility attention" on the availability of AT. A far more serious problem is the lack of accessible materials, including textbooks.
What constitutes accessible text materials? Accessible materials teach by providing information through multiple senses and learning modalities. One major characteristic of accessible materials is they transform gracefully from one format to another or are provided in multiple formats (which tap multiple senses) from the start.
On the other hand, just because a format is "assistive" doesn't make it accessible. For example, Braille is a generally inaccessible format because only a small portion of people can read it. Braille is usually produced from e-text, a format that "transforms gracefully." From this perspective, e-text is a more accessible format when compared to Braille because information that is conveyed in electronic text (e-text) can be converted to many different formats, including Braille.
Some examples of e-text formats are html and text documents, wordprocessing documents and acrobat (portable document format .pdf) files.
How do I select accessible learning materials?Selecting learning materials is like filling a hole in the puzzle of the instructional design of the course. Let's assume that our puzzle has several pieces left and all of them can fit into the hole. There may be no "right" piece but rather multiple shapes of pieces that could fit to complete the picture.
Materials that "fit" into the design, but only convey information in one sense (e.g. visual, audio, tactile) can be thought of as puzzle pieces that partially fit the hole, but not fully.
The more senses or modalities any single piece embodies, the better the piece fits. Two or more pieces could be used to fill in the hole more completely. Occasionally (but not often), a single piece may fit perfectly into the hole. This piece would not only allow assimilation through multiple senses, but also tap into students' different learning preferences, styles and modalities.
For more information on the above, see the FAME Universal Design for Learning module.
CAST also has a good discussion on this topic located at http://www.cast.org
Key Concept: Multiple types of learning materials increase the accessibility of the course for all students, including students with disabilities.
