Profiles

In the Latin America and Caribbean region, more than 19 million children have a disability. In Jamaica, disability is a major factor of exclusion from the education system. The Accessible Digital Textbooks for All (ADT) initiative, implements accessible digital tools and content to make learning accessible to all students – with and without disabilities – in the same classroom. This report presents the research results of the ADT prototypes testing for children with and without disabilities in Jamaica. The report provides results across three areas: • It analyses teachers’ and students’ familiarity with technology, including their experience utilizing technology to support education and learning. • It investigates the pedagogical practices used for inclusive education and to integrate the ADT prototypes as tools to support inclusion and learning. • It recommends ways to improve the prototypes and outlines elements needed for their further development, implementation and scale-up in the education system. This study is part of longer-term research that examines the implementation of accessible digital textbooks in multiple countries. Future research aims to explore the impact of the use of ADTs on both student learning and inclusion on a larger scale.

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.