What do the UDL Guidelines suggest?
1.3 Options that provide alternatives for visual information
Graphics, Animations, or Video are often the optimal way to present information, especially when the information is about the relationships between objects, actions, numbers, or events. But such visual representations are not equally accessible to all students, especially students with visual disabilities or those who are not familiar with the graphical conventions employed. To ensure that all students have equal access to that information, provide non-visual alternatives that use other modalities: text, touch, or audition.
Text is a special case of visual information. Since text is a visual representation of spoken language, the transformation from text back into speech is among the most easily accomplished methods for increasing accessibility. The advantage of text over speech is its permanence, but providing text that is easily transformable into speech accomplishes that permanence without sacrificing the advantages of speech. Digital synthetic text to speech is increasingly effective but still disappoints in the ability to carry the valuable information in prosody.
