The Dutch best practice for teaching chemistry diagrams to the visually impaired

Abstract

We report on a project to develop a best practice for representing molecule diagrams for teaching Chemistry to blind and visually impaired students in Dutch secondary education. The goal was to provide both a resource for inclusive curriculum development for chemistry teachers and a source of reference for visually impaired students. Technically our solution provides a repository of commonly occurring chemical structures via a web site with interactive, fully accessible molecule diagrams together with a thematic volume of corresponding tactile images. The repository was created in close collaboration with chemistry teachers, one partially sighted, and a blind student. We report on the technical solution to generate the web accessible diagrams in Dutch, some of the necessary adaptations as well as the initial deployment of the catalogue.