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, an Accessibility Tutoring Programme – PTA guided by specialists in special education, with trained tutors, and complemented by a system of peer learning and collaboration, with guidance and access to support resources and documents, that fosters academic, social and personal development 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.
- Manager
Opportunity
Every HEI has the opportunity to offer a PTA at the start of each academic term, including: help organising and planning academic activities; support in assessments and academic activities; production of guides and orientation outlines; help mastering audio and video assistive technologies; production of accessible materials; mediation with the teachers of each course unit; mediation with the programme’s academic administration; activity planning; delivery of reports; participation in initiatives, training and follow-up of the work; fulfilment of the 12 weekly hours, at times to be agreed with the student.
Applicability
Do
Formalise the PTA by giving students accessible guides and study plans. The information should be broken into short, hierarchical topics so that the student with a visual impairment can move quickly through their weekly goals and schedule.
Don’t
Present the tutoring schedule and support materials as dense blocks of text with no hierarchy (long continuous paragraphs), which hinders memorisation, reading for people with low vision, and navigation by keyboard shortcuts in a screen reader.
Examples
An example of a hierarchically structured "PTA orientation guide". Real bulleted lists (<ul> and <li> in HTML), together with generous line spacing and wide margins, let people with low vision find the start of each line easily.
An example of a dense planning document set justified (which creates "rivers" of white space that confuse readers with low vision). The absence of topics and subheadings, plus tight spacing, turns the material into a visual and cognitive barrier.