Guiding Principles

• Through this initiative the Tennessee Board of Regents seeks to provide persons with disabilities the opportunity to use instructional materials and technologies that allow them to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as persons without disabilities in an equally effective and equally integrated manner and with substantially equivalent ease of use. 

• To this end, rather than restricting currently available resources, the system will develop ways to make instructional materials and the resources of educational success more easily available to an increasingly wide student audience more often.

Actions

• The system and individual institutions will have procedures in place to prompt discussions of accessibility in decisions about pedagogy structures, the selection of classroom materials and purchases of instructional and educational materials.
• The system and individual institutions will use purchasing power to influence vendors and publishers to provide instructional materials with more accessible functionality.
• The system and individual institutions will have training in place to ensure that faculty and staff have the knowledge and expertise required to make informed decisions about the deployment of accessible instructional materials and also the skills needed to create more accessible materials.
• The system and individual institutions will have accessibility teams to evaluate campus progress in identification and remediation of accessibility concerns.
• The system and individual institutions will have assessment mechanisms in place to evaluate the effectiveness of accessibility resources and initiatives. Regular analysis of the results of these evaluations will inform ongoing improvements.
• The system and individual institutions will maintain an ongoing implementation plan seeking to increase accessibility to educational resources incorporating findings from ongoing analysis of the assessment mechanisms as well as established best practices.
• The system and individual institutions will seek ways to create partnerships both within the system and with other state and national agencies to enable the sharing of expertise, knowledge and best practices as well as using scale as a tool to provide superior accessibility solutions.

Information courtesy of the Tennessee Board of Regents Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs