SimBiotic Software Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT®)
At SimBio, we are committed to helping all students learn biology. To this end, we have made tremendous gains toward WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, and we now support or partially support all applicable accessibility guidelines. For more details, review the attached VPAT® form. We continue to research and implement new tools, features, and approaches to increase the accessibility of our digital content.
The interactivity and open-endedness of many of our discovery-driven simulation activities confer important learning benefits to students and also present significant challenges toward the goal of full accessibility. Our software uses sophisticated simulations that students experimentally manipulate to explore and learn biological processes, which are inherently random and dynamic. We are committed to researching ways of making the dynamic aspects of our vast inventory of biology teaching tools more accessible. We consult students with disabilities to advise us, and we’ve conducted grant-funded research. While we continue our efforts, we believe that providing accessibility support for educators is appropriate and effective for making our content more universally accessible.
If a student with a disability is challenged by the complexity of our simulations and assessments, we can work with the instructor to help them train a collaborator in assisting the student. For example, a sighted student could describe to a blind student how a dynamic simulation unfolds, and the two can jointly decide how to adjust inputs or otherwise respond. If needed, SimBio will help pay for the collaborator’s time. We have helped students set up such arrangements, and, in our experience, this approach works well. As a bonus, there is a body of research showing that student collaboration on active-learning tasks, such as those that form the foundation of our interactive teaching tools, leads to greater learning gains than students working individually. Thus, both the student who requires accessibility affordances and their collaborator are likely to learn more by working together than either would by working independently. If collaboration between students is not a feasible solution, we will work on a case-by-case basis with institutions and instructors to provide the necessary accommodations.
