Accessible
Sex Education
Resources for Students who are
Visually Impaired: Assistive
Technology is Required
Gaylen Kapperman
(gkapperman@niu.edu) and Stacy Kelly
(skelly@niu.edu)
Northern Illinois University
Given the ever-growing amount of accessi-
ble reading material now available to students
who are blind or severely impaired, we believe
that teachers and parents should help their stu-
dents avail themselves of the vast amount and
variety of reading material which is now available
on all aspects of sexuality. All of this information
is readily available to sighted youngsters. We be-
lieve that there is no reason why it should not be
made available for youngsters who are blind or
have low vision when all of the proper parent/
guardian permissions have been secured and
school procedures are followed (see Kapperman
& Kelly, 2013). Use of the proper assistive tech-
nology devices and software can afford these in-
dividuals access to the very wide range of infor-
mation on this important topic of sexuality. Thus, it
is our intent to summarize the resources which
are available.
We begin with an overview of general and
disability-specific sources for digital books that in-
clude sex education content. We searched each
of these sources for accessible sex education
content and at the end of this article we present a
list of sex education book titles that showcases
the findings of our search. We wish to state here
that we make no claims that the list included is in
any way exhaustive. It is not! It should be
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