Accessible Educational Materials (AEM): Why a Device Alone Isn't Enough

A family is often told that once a student has assistive technology, access to their schoolwork is solved. That is only half true. The device or software is one half of the equation. The other half is whether the actual material, the worksheet, textbook, slideshow, or website the student is asked to use, was built in a way that AT can actually work with. When that material is not accessible, even well-matched AT cannot fully do its job.

What "Accessible Educational Materials" Means

Accessible Educational Materials, usually shortened to AEM, refers to instructional content, textbooks, worksheets, documents, and digital materials, that is designed or converted so that students who need alternate formats or assistive technology can actually use it. This includes materials in braille, large print, audio, and accessible digital text, and it also includes ordinary digital files (like a PDF, Word document, or slideshow) that are properly structured so that a screen reader, text-to-speech tool, or switch-access system can work with them correctly.

A Note on Terminology

Older federal materials and some state guidance use the term Accessible Instructional Materials, or AIM. Current practice, including work from the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST, generally uses the term Accessible Educational Materials, or AEM, which is the broader and more current term. You may still see AIM used in older documents or in some state policy language, and AIM is often used for the narrower set of specialized formats that carry the same content as a print textbook. If a school team uses one term and you have read about the other, they are very likely talking about the same general topic, and it is reasonable to ask a team member to clarify which term their district's policy uses.

Why a Device Does Not Solve an Inaccessible Material

Consider a student who uses a screen reader, software that reads on-screen text aloud or converts it to braille. If that student is given a PDF that is actually just a scanned image of a printed page, with no underlying accessible text, the screen reader has nothing to read. The device is working exactly as intended. The material simply was not built to work with it. The same mismatch shows up in several common situations.

A student uses text-to-speech software to have written material read aloud, but is given a worksheet where the "text" is actually a picture of text (for example, a photographed or scanned page), so there is no real text underneath for the software to read.

A student who is blind or has low vision uses a screen reader to navigate by heading and by link, but is given a website or document with no real heading structure and links that just say "click here," so there is nothing meaningful for the screen reader to jump between.

A student who cannot use a mouse relies entirely on keyboard navigation, but is given access to a website or learning tool that only responds to mouse clicks, so keyboard-only navigation simply stops working partway through.

A student with low vision uses a large-print or zoomed display, but is given a fixed-size document or interface that does not reflow or resize, so enlarging it crops the page or forces the student to scroll sideways to read each line, instead of making it readable.

In each of these cases, the student's AT is doing its job. The material was not built in a way that AT could use. AT can also have its own fit or setup problems, but that is a separate question from whether the material works with it.

What Accessible Materials Actually Look Like

Accessible digital materials generally share a few practical features. They use real, selectable text rather than pictures of text, so a screen reader or text-to-speech tool has something to read. They use headings and structure that a screen reader can navigate, rather than relying only on font size or bold text to show organization, since visual formatting alone does not tell a screen reader that something is a heading. Meaningful images, charts, and diagrams include a short written description, sometimes called alternative text, so a student using a screen reader knows what the image shows. Purely decorative images generally do not need this. Links are labeled with a description of where they go, rather than a generic phrase, so a student navigating by links can tell them apart. Math and science content is represented in a form assistive technology can actually process, rather than as an image of an equation, when accessible math tools are available and appropriate for that content.

Accessible-format resources can help with part of the materials problem. Bookshare offers accessible ebooks in formats such as audio and braille, and Learning Ally offers human-narrated audiobooks. Both are for students who qualify through their eligibility process, and neither has every title. For eligible students with print disabilities, they can reduce how often a school has to convert a text from scratch.

Providing AT Does Not Solve Inaccessible Curriculum

This is worth saying directly, because it is easy to assume otherwise: providing a student with assistive technology does not, by itself, solve an inaccessible curriculum. The device and the material are two separate pieces, and both need attention. A team that has done excellent work matching a student to the right AT, but has not checked whether that student's actual daily materials work with that AT, has only finished half the job.

For school teams: When a specific worksheet, PDF, or slide deck is not working for a student's AT, it is rarely useful to treat that as a mystery. A quick, specific check, such as "is this a scanned image or real text," "does this have real headings," or "can I tab through this using only the keyboard," usually identifies the exact problem in a few minutes, and often the original file (in Word or Google Docs form, for example) can be fixed or exported in an accessible format rather than needing to be rebuilt from scratch.

Practical Examples

A high school student with a print disability uses text-to-speech software daily. Her English class assigns a novel available through Bookshare in an accessible format compatible with her software, so she reads and annotates it independently alongside her classmates.

A middle school student who is blind uses a screen reader for all coursework. His science teacher shares a lab handout as a scanned image PDF. The screen reader has no text to read. Once the teacher shares the original Word document instead, with headings and real text, the same screen reader can read it, because the underlying content, not the student's AT, was the barrier.

A student with a physical disability navigates entirely by keyboard. An online quiz platform works correctly with keyboard navigation for questions but requires a mouse click to submit answers. Switching the platform's default settings, or working with the vendor to confirm keyboard-accessible submission, can resolve the barrier without changing the student's AT at all.

For more on the technical side of accessible documents, see Digital Accessibility. For device-side supports that pair with accessible materials, see Reading Assistive Technology, Writing Assistive Technology, and Assistive Technology for Math. For students who use AAC, see Academic AAC: Communication, Curriculum Access, and Classroom Participation.