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Educational Media | Media at Home + Work

Accessible Assessments
Alternative Text

Accessibility for students with print disabilities includes ensuring access to the text and images of an item. This requires high-quality text alternatives for images and a visual bias review.

  • NCAM has an in-house editorial unit of assessment and disability specialists prepared to create image descriptions for you.
  • NCAM can train your team of editors and writers to create accessible items including effective and efficient image descriptions.
  • NCAM can review image descriptions created by another agency as part of the quality-assurance process.
Background:
NCAM has developed research-based guidelines for making images and assessments accessible through a series of projects including the STEM Description Guidelines, funded by the National Science Foundation, and Describing Images for Enhanced Assessments, funded and the U.S. Department of Education. Currently, NCAM staff serve as subject matter experts on the Guidelines for Accessibility of Assessments Project (GAAP) which is charged the creating comprehensive audio accommodation guidelines for the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments. In addition, NCAM has years of experience producing image descriptions, training description writers, and is often hired to review image descriptions created by other agencies.