DIGITAL TOOLS AND SCHOOL INCLUSION: A PRACTICAL APPROACH

The paper tackles the issue of the accessibility of educational software products as a means for fostering the full inclusion of all students in mainstream educational systems. Educational software tools offer a strong potential for avoiding any kind of discrimination among students but may also pose new “technological barriers”. School inclusion, on the contrary, necessarily requires the adoption of suitable and barrier-free educational tools. The paper presents a live DVD called “So.Di.Linux for All”, which has been designed and implemented following the basic principles of the “Design for all”. Such a DVD contains and provides full and immediate access to a collection of 140 Open Source software products for education, whose accessibility features are fully described. The DVD has been produced in the framework of a research project aimed at assessing the accessibility of educational applications and is now available online