Background
Why do students with disabilities need digital and alternate format materials?
Many students with disabilities face barriers to participation and learning due to their difficulties with printed curriculum materials. Students who have problems decoding or comprehending the meaning of written text, seeing the words or images on a page, holding a book and turning its pages, and so on, often struggle with standard classroom resources. These students benefit from more accessible digital and alternate text formats.
What are some of the challenges in providing students with alternate format materials?
Although educators recognize the benefits of these materials for their students, current methods of providing them are inconsistent and there is a great deal of duplication of effort in resource production. Individual educators around the province have varying access to the technologies required to produce alternate format materials and, even if they do have those technologies, can lack the technical expertise or time required to produce the materials. For those educators who do produce alternate format materials, they often do so in isolation and based on specific student and classroom needs. It is not uncommon for the same Grade 6 Science textbook to be scanned many times in the same school district and certainly around the province.
With more and more classrooms moving towards adopting the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) philosophy and strategies and the increasing popularity of software that can produce and read e-text, some school districts have begun their own coordination of alternate format materials in an attempt to reduce duplication and make these materials available to their own educators. This coordination has generally depended on submissions of alternate format materials from the field rather than production of materials in a centralized manner. This can create quality and copyright issues which can also be challenging to address.
The ARC-BC project is being developed to overcome many of the challenges facing BC educators in providing high quality alternate format materials based on the BC curriculum.