Effective Practices for Description of Science Content – Resources

Resources for Describing STEM Images

• General
  
  • American Printing House for the Blind's Accessible Tests Department offers guidelines and other publications .
  • NCAM's Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web .
  • The National Center for Blind Youth in Science has a portal for STEM resources.
  • TEST ACCESS: Guidelines for Computer Administered Testing.
    For digital textbooks that include video clips, the Description Key for Educational Media offers guidelines for describing video.

• Charts and Graphs
  
  • Chart Explainer automatically generates textual summaries of charts and tables.
  • Mathtrax is a graph describer developed by NASA.

• Math
  
  • MathType by Design Science converts math written in Word into MathML.
  • MathPlayer by Design Science reads MathML in spoken English.
  • MathSpeak Initiative by gh reads MathML in spoken Nemeth code.
  • Accessiblemath.org provides accessible math resources and links.
  • InftyReader is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) application that recognizes and translates math images (BMP, GIF, PDF, PNG and TIFF) into LaTeX, MathML and Word 2007 XML files automatically.
  • ChattyInfty is a math editor with voice output.
  • The Nemeth Braille Code For Mathematics and Science
  • Handbook of Spoken Mathematics: Larry's Speakeasy
    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
    Disabilities Services
    P.O. Box 808, L-716
    Livermore, CA 94551

• Tactile Graphics
  
  • Perkins School for the Blind maintains a list of tactile graphic resources .
  • Tactile Graphics Website provides a planning sheet and a decision tree for creating tactile graphics.

DTB Standards and NIMAS Resources

• DTB Standards
  
  • DAISY Consortium (Digital Information Access SYstem Consortium)
  • DAISY.org/tools maintains extensive lists of DTB readers and publishing software.
• NIMAS Resources
  
  • National Instructional Materials Access Center
  • NIMAS Development & Technical Assistance Centers
  • Center for Applied Special Technology: CAST