The WGBH National Center for Accessible Media is embedding the capacity to transform and customize presentation of NSDL resources based on individual user profiles. The project focuses on making middle school resources more accessible to support students with disabilities during the critical transition in STEM learning that occurs in the middle school years. The Integrated Service offered by this initiative builds on collaborative work embodied in the custom NSDL Access For All portal standard which enables digital delivery systems to match a user's specific accessibility needs to the characteristics of a resource. The service benefits any collection that provides Access For All metadata to the NSDL Data Repository and thereby greatly extends the usefulness of NSDL by enabling students and teachers with disabilities to independently access and benefit from NSDL resources. This system-wide application enables the use of universal design features for all NSDL resource collections for diverse learners. The schema is documented for use by all collections. Training sessions support catalogers in evaluating accessibility of existing resources and in making new resources accessible as they are added to the data repository. External evaluation is concurrently documenting the effectiveness of project activities and outcomes on partner collections. Evaluation includes assessing the impact on NSDL, other digital repositories and on educators and organizations supporting learners with disabilities. A publicly documented metadata schema, recorded in the NSDL community, ensures that new collections can add Access for All metadata at any time and is automatically promoted in the NSDL Access For All portal.
The Internet is full of STEM resources, but the right resources can be hard to find for students with disabilities and their parents and teachers. Access to NSDL offers a search tool that finds the right resource for each learner, whether they need captions for videos, or text descriptions for images, or some other accessibility feature. The site catalogs selected resources from the National STEM Digital Library (NSDL) with information about their accessibility features. Visit Access to NSDL at . (See image AccessToNSDL.) Access to NSDL offers the ability to filter search results to focus on results for specific learner needs. For example, for a user who can't hear, there is a filter called "Useful without Sound." This filter includes resources that offer accessibility features to replace sound, such as captions or a transcript, and also includes resources that don't have any sound, such as web pages, documents, and images, that are useful for learners who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Nearly 2000 resources cataloged on Access To NSDL are useful without sound. (See image AccessToNSDL2.) Similarly, over 400 resources are cataloged that are useful without vision, including pages with images that have text description, pages where images are not needed to understand the content, and podcasts where audio is the primary medium. (See image AccessToNSDL3.) This approach to personalized accessibility, helping each learner find what they need rather than marking a resource as "100% accessible" or "not accessible," is known as Access for All and grows out of work at the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Learn more about the IMS work for accessible learning technologies at . Access for All, as a part of the Accessible Portable Item Protocol, is a crucial part of the accessibility features built into modern educational assessment systems. The right accommodations, built right into every student's standardized test, can provide easier administration and a better opportunity for every student to show what they know. Learn more at . And, coming soon to mainstream search engines, information about accessibility features could be available in every search result. Accessibility metadata is now part of the Schema.org metadata vocabulary, and is gaining ground with participation from major collections including Kahn Academy, Bookshare, Hathi Trust, the Open Library Initiative, the Learning Registry, Yahoo!, and the Francophone accessible digital library, La Bibliothèque Numérique Francophone Accessible. While search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing do not reveal their implementation plans, the larger the number of resources marked up with accessibility metadata, the more likely it is that search engines will begin using it. Learn more at and . (See image AccessibilityMetadata.)
