Resource
Practical and visual guidelines for creating teaching materials and interactive systems that are flexible, legible and multisensory.
Recommendation
It is recommended to make available to every student, including those with a visual impairment, all teaching content with clarity, coherence and cohesion of language, format and structure, across different pieces of information and resources, in order to guarantee access and understanding 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 teacher, tutor, content author and instructional designer.
- Teacher
- Tutor
- Content author
- Instructional designer
Opportunity
Every teacher and tutor has the opportunity to organise the content precisely and gradually within the teaching material, system or resource, explaining complex concepts by first reviewing the fundamentals and then connecting them to future practical applications.
Applicability
Do
Keep the layout predictable across handouts or presentations: headings always in the same place and standard formatting for alerts and body text, reducing the student’s cognitive and memory load.
Don’t
Change the visual structure radically from one page to the next (for instance, jumping from slides with a dark background and the heading at the top to white slides with the text scattered in random bubbles).
Examples
Use of structured templates. Repetition and the standard alignment of headings and text blocks help students predict where to find the vital information, ensuring fluency and autonomy.
Breaking contrast and hierarchy rules without warning. The lack of standardisation disorients students with low vision, forcing them to sweep the whole screen looking for the new location of the main content.