State lawmakers have reached an agreement on a bill that ensures blind students in public schools receive timely learning materials.
That means textbooks, posters and audio recordings will be provided to students in braille and tactile graphics. This helps blind and visually impaired students read words and complicated graphs through their fingertips.
Tabatha Mitchell is a mother of a blind student at Kalaheo High School. She said the move will help with the process of Individualized Education Programs.
"What we hope to see with this bill is that this gives the classroom teachers and the administrators and the parents when they sit down at IEP meetings, it gives them where they can have kind of like a checklist," Mitchell said.
"To say ‘OK, these are the things types of things that we need to talk through and that needs to be included in the individualized education plan, so that things aren’t missed and so therefore that your IEP are typically done the year before,'" she continued.
The latest version of the House Bill 388 adopts the National Instructional Material Accessibility Standard. It updates the state law to match the federal law, requiring publishers to provide recent electronic files.
The bill will head to the governor’s office for final approval, where the measure will take effect immediately.
