Disseminating Effective Practices for Describing STEM Content for People who are Blind or Visually Impaired is an Information Dissemination proposal that builds upon the two prior awards for creating accessible non-text science images for students and professionals who are blind or visually impaired (HRD-0435663 and HRD-0622857). The primary institution, WGBH Educational Foundation's National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) proposes a two-year project to disseminate and institutionalize research-based practices for effective descriptions, for blind and visually impaired students, of non-text science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content within electronic text. Proposed activities will build capacity among publishers and content developers to create concise and meaningful descriptions within digital content for science-focused images, charts, graphs, diagrams, illustrations, equations, and other graphics. The following four partner organizations will work closely with the WGBH-NCAM team to disseminate the research-based practices: The National Instructional Materials Access Center (NIMAC) at the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), The Center for Applied Special Technologies (CAST) which operates the NIMAS (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) Technical Assistance Center, The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), and Benetech, a leading nonprofit social enterprise that maintains Bookshare - a service slated to be the nation's largest provider of accessible textbooks.
The research on which this dissemination project is based is an NSF-funded seminal effort to develop recommended practices for audio descriptions of science images within digital talking books (DTBs). The work was jointly undertaken by leading organizations that pioneered description for visually impaired users and are currently shaping national policy and practices for the provision of accessible materials in electronic formats. Research results indicate strong preferences among visually impaired post-secondary students and science-focused adults that require significant changes to current practices and support the value of concise approaches in providing ready and meaningful access to information embedded in illustrations, graphs, and other visual resources. Dissemination activities will help turn research into practice at a pivotal time in the development of digital talking books and electronic text, given recent federal and state mandates for provision of accessible digital textbooks and educational materials.
The following dissemination deliverables are expected from this project: 1. Exemplars of textbooks and professional journal articles that illustrate the preferred approach for describing science-focused images, charts, graphs, diagrams, illustrations, equations, and other graphics, to serve as models for publishers or others creating DTBs or NIMAS files. 2. Specialized workshops (in-person and online) on descriptive practices, customized for individual organizations and target audiences. 3. A comprehensive Web site on STEM description, for use by the above organizations and beyond, which provides targeted training materials for different users, exemplars and other showcase description samples, archived workshop sessions, consolidated FAQs representing diverse attendee questions, and a summary that captures next-step needs identified by workshop participants. 4. Update to an existing and widely disseminated online NCAM publication, "Accessible Digital Media," that will integrate description research results.
