Inclusive Pedagogical Books: Strategies and Options to Build Accessible Resources

Education, in Portugal, suffered recent legal changes that increased inclusion principles for students with Special Needs. Those laws generate new opportunities and actions, involving new pedagogical resources that must be accessible to children with or without disabilities. There are still few of these adapted products to use in the education context, whereby a multidisciplinary team from the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria (composed of teachers, researchers and students) is developing the project Learning Products for ALL (ProLearn4ALL). This project intends to create ludic and pedagogical products that create awareness in children from Primary School toward inclusion and respect for people's diversity. From those new products, we emphasize books with a pedagogical inclusive mission in their subjects and also with strategies and accessibility options that allow them to be explored by ALL users, trying to reduce communication barriers. For such a result, we assumed Design for ALL basic principles, creating products that respect human diversity. To empower this work, Education, Arts and Social Sciences get together, validating productions in a sequence of critical reflection, dialog and continuous improvement. This process occurred in several stages, starting from the texts made by higher education students to focus on awareness of disability. Those initial texts resulted in simple but accessible prototypes to be developed by Arts and Design students, with augmented books with different communication possibilities, such as bigger font letters, Braille, audio text, symbols and haptic illustration. All these communication strategies and options served the purpose of making books for children that can be used at school, at home, or in any other significant learning context where children can use these books as ludic and pedagogical objects.