The Ministry of Education has released the guidelines for the development of e-Content for Children with Disabilities on June 8, 2021. The guidelines seek to create high quality content for digital education to children with special needs. The Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education had constituted a Committee of experts, for recommending guidelines for developing e-content for these children. The Committee submitted a report titled “Guidelines for the Development of e-Content for Children with Disabilities”. This report was shared, presented, discussed and accepted by the Ministry of Education.
The salient highlights of the e- content guidelines in the report, as released vide the Press Release are as follows:
- e-Content for Children with Disabilities should be developed based on the four principles namely: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
- e-Content including text, tables, diagrams, visuals, audios, videos etc. should comply with accessibility standards: national standards (GIGW 2.0) and international standards (WCAG 2.1, E-Pub, DAISY etc).
- Distribution platforms on which content is uploaded (e.g., DIKSHA) and reading platforms/devices on which content is accessed and interacted (e.g., e-pathshala) must comply with technical standards
- Reasonable pedagogical accommodations have been recommended to meet specific needs of Children with Disabilities.
- The technical standards and guidelines have been detailed out in Section 4 of the report.
- In Sections 6 to 9 the Committee has recommended specific guidelines for development of supplementary e-Content as per 21 disabilities specified in the RPWD Act 2016 for students having Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Multiple Disabilities, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Specific Learning Disabilities, Blindness, low vision, Deafness and Hard of Hearing and others.
- Universal Design for Learning (UDL)guidelines for content development and pedagogical accommodations are given in Appendix 2 of the report.
*Tanvi Singh, Editorial Assistant has put this story together.