We’ve seen the use of education technology become more prevalent this past year. We’ve also seen an additional disruption in education as COVID-19 impacted student achievement, particularly in diverse student populations with accessibility needs. Aside from the overarching challenges of learning from home, the nation’s nearly 7 million students with disabilities had additional obstacles to overcome during the pandemic. For these students, the move to Zoom wasn’t a fixall solution for remote learning.
New Century Education Foundation is embedding lessons into its adaptive, online tutoring system, to address the needs of dyslexic students of any age. New Century, a nonprofit that focuses on helping teachers and parents improve the learning of students with specific needs, is working with Noah Text to add its stories into the organization's "Intelligent Tutoring System."
Instructure, which produces the learning management system Canvas, recently announced that it is making Immersive Reader from Microsoft freely available in its application.
With districts around the country relying on their websites to convey essential information to their communities, accessibility is more important than ever.
A new plugin for Google Chrome helps users identify web content that isn't accessible. The uTester Developer Plugin from User1st specifically highlights content that doesn't comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.
Everyday Speech is integrating new features into its social-emotional learning (SEL) offering for educators to personalize the teaching experience for each student using evidence-based strategies and tools.
Blackboard's Ally accessibility tool is now available for D2L's Brightspace learning management system.
A global prize competition called Sign On For Literacy has awarded five innovators seed funding to develop technology-based solutions that increase access to sign language and improve literacy outcomes among deaf children in "low resource" settings.
The Online Learning Consortium has introduced a series of original reports to keep people in education up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of digital learning. The first report covers accessibility and addresses both K-12 and higher education. The series is being produced by O.L.C.'s Research Center for Digital Learning & Leadership.
Blackboard today introduced Blackboard Ally for Web, a solution for assessing and improving the accessibility of institutions' websites. The tool expands on Blackboard's Ally product (launched last year), which focuses on the accessibility of course materials in learning management systems.