Norms for content for disabled children
The Hindu
Digital education resources must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust: Centre
The Education Ministry has laid down new guidelines for producing digital education resources for children with disabilities, after a year in which the COVID-driven shift to online education has spotlighted the lacunae in such resources. However, the PDF document containing the guidelines does not even follow its own rules, making it partially inaccessible to the visually challenged, says an activist, raising concerns about effective implementation. The guidelines, released by Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank on Tuesday, are based on four guiding principles, stipulating that all resources must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust for disabled students. They recommend that all textbooks be made digitally accessible in a phased manner, so that they are available in multiple formats such as text, audio, video and sign language with turn-on and turn-off features. Detailed technical standards have been provided. The closure of regular schools and learning centres due to COVID-19 has led to special difficulties for many disabled children. For instance, a recent study by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy showed that more than half of the NCERT textbooks available on the government’s virtual education platform DIKSHA were not accessible for visually impaired students.More Related News