Innovating for Inclusion: Testing Uruguay’s first Accessible Digital Textbook for children with and without disabilities

By? Sophia Torres Cantella ,? Ursula Hinostroza Castillo , Lucia Varela and Komai Garabelli

Children with disabilities remain one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society.?Children with disabilities?are?49 per cent more likely to have never attended school compared to children without disabilities. Even when in school, children with disabilities still face unique and additional barriers to learning, including limited access to appropriate and accessible teaching and learning materials.??

New and innovative technologies can be catalytic to advance inclusion in education to ensure ALL children can access, participate and learn in school.?The UNICEF-led?Accessible Digital Textbooks (ADT) initiative, in collaboration with Ministries of Education and implementing partners, follows?Universal Design of Learning (UDL)?principles to design and produce accessible digital textbooks (ADTs) for children with and without disabilities, to ensure that all students can learn together. ADTs have accessibility features such as sign language videos, navigation support, voice over and image descriptions, subtitles and interactive UDL activities.??

In Uruguay, UNICEF and the National Administration of Public Education (ANEP)*1, have designed and tested the first ADT for primary education in the country:?Cuaderno para leer y escribir en primero.?The ADT offers much more than a traditional textbook, with a variety of accessible writing and reading activities, covering topics like vocabulary, decoding, and phonological awareness.

To ensure the quality and fit for purpose of the ADT, user testing was carried out to see how children were able to engage with its features.?The user testing encompassed four types of schools, involving groups of children aged 6 to 12. Each group consisted of 4 to 5 students, including children with learning difficulties, visual impairments, hearing impairments, intellectual disabilities and students without disabilities. Students used their?personal accessible devices?provided by?Ceibal*2. Each group was supervised by a teacher and additional support from specialized teachers was provided based on the specific needs of students.?

Findings?

All children were very engaged and motivated when using the ADT.?Their proficiency with digital devices used regularly for leisure and academic purposes enabled them to navigate and interact with the textbook effectively.???

• Both the group of students without disabilities and those with learning disabilities engaged with the ADT independently or with minimal support.?This independence is closely linked to the design of the book, which was intended to coexist with and complement other tools that students are already familiar with, such as Ceibal devices, browsers and media players.?
• Teacher guidance was key to support children with different types of disabilities when first introducing the ADT in class to explain specific features.?Some students with intellectual disabilities faced some difficulties activating and deactivating the audio function, as well as forwarding and rewinding the videos, at the beginning of the user testing.?
• Uruguayan sign language videos and interactive activities were greatly appreciated by children with hearing disabilities.?Especially as some students with hearing disabilities are much more familiar with sign language and are just starting to learn to read and write.?
• Students with visual disabilities encountered difficulties making use of the screen reader function in the ADT, which is commonly not used for early grades.?Thus, it is recommended that the ADT incorporates voice over and audio descriptions for images and icons instead of a more advanced screen reader function.??

The user testing research highlighted tangible areas for improvement in the software,?such as:??

1. Ensuring the sign language videos fit properly on the screen across different devices to prevent any cutoff.
2. Enhancing the clarity of instructions to avoid errors or confusion when selecting answers.
3. Improving the visibility of the index button to prevent confusion with the background.
4. Making changes to the font for improved readability.

Stay tuned

Once feedback from the initial testing has been incorporated, the first ADT in Uruguay will be scaled to schools across the country in late 2023.?

UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight is working together with UNICEF’s regional and country offices in Latin America and the Caribbean to embed mixed-methods research into the ADT initiative. The research aims to learn from children and teachers how to improve inclusive learning experiences, and share these findings with partners, teachers, developers, and governments facing similar challenges worldwide. This is part of a global initiative to build?implementation research into de the deployment of digital learning?to learn and improve programmes globally.?

*1 - In addition to being the body responsible for the planning, management and administration of all primary and secondary schools, as well as teacher training in the country, ANEP is the entity that produces, edits and distributes all the books of primary education text.

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*2?- Ceibal is the center for educational innovation with digital technologies in Uruguay. It arises as a policy of one laptop per child. Currently, it promotes the integration of digital technologies in education, in order to improve learning and promote processes of innovation, inclusion and personal growth.

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