Institution
Structural and support guidelines to ensure the academic environment fosters the autonomy and inclusion of students with visual impairments.
Recommendation
It is recommended to make available to every student, including those with a visual impairment, all information, training, resources or conditions that guarantee participation in every space and activity of the HEI with autonomy.
The recommendations were formulated in Brazilian Portuguese. This is a faithful working translation; the Portuguese version is the canonical one. Read the original in Portuguese
Responsibility
Every manager, teacher and administrative staff member.
- Manager
- Teacher
- Administrative staff
Opportunity
Every HEI has the opportunity to offer accessibility-related activities during staff development periods, such as talks; training; presentation of the assistive technologies and services available.
Applicability
Do
Publish all institutional announcements, guides and regulations in accessible digital formats (text structured in HTML, or PDFs that screen readers can read), and run regular training on assistive technologies.
Don’t
Communicate academic guidelines or offer training materials using image files alone (announcements as JPG/PNG, or PDFs scanned as photographs), which are incompatible with screen readers and cannot be magnified without blurring.
Examples
An example of a digital institutional announcement with a dark background and light text (AAA contrast), set in a large sans-serif face (18pt). The text is real HTML, so screen readers read it perfectly and it magnifies without loss of quality.
An example of a document "scanned" as an image, with low contrast (grey on light grey), a small serif face and justified text. Besides being tiring for people with low vision, screen readers cannot decode the words inside the image.