Formative by Newsela is committed to maintaining a high level of accessibility, and delivering instructional materials that truly benefit every student. We design and develop our product to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA and Section 508 conformance standards. You can learn more about our accessibility process and our alignment to those standards in our Accessibility Statement. In keeping with our mission, we are committed to making continuous improvements in accessibility across Formative.

Our site is built and tested for use on a broad range of internet-enabled devices, so that a maximum number of students can interact on their personal devices. Specific site features for accessibility include, yet are not restricted to:

**on supported items (see more below)

While Formative aims to support the highest level of accessibility, ultimately Formative assignments and assessments are built by teachers who know the needs of their students best.

A fully accessible formative will allow students to utilize external accessibility tools, such as screen readers and keyboards. To ensure a formative is fully accessible we recommend utilizing only the supported question types listed below and avoiding usage of the unsupported enriched content or text formatting items. If unsupported enriched content is entered into a formative, we highly recommend it would be in addition to the fully supported items and not instead of them. If adding unsupported enriched content nonetheless, we recommend also adding descriptive text into supported plain text fields to accompany it.

🎧 If you are one of our Gold users, you can enable a Text to Speech accommodation for your students on the global level from within Formative!

​To set a global accommodation for Text to Speech:

Please read this article for additional information on Formative's in-house Text to Speech feature, it's capabilities and options.

🎧 If you do not have a Gold license with Formative you can enable text to speech capabilities on the student device instead.

Chromebooks:

iOS Mobile Devices:

iOS Desktop/Laptop Devices:

All responses in Formative auto-save so students can work on a formative in multiple sessions. To break up the sessions for the student, select the assign settings to display each item as a separate page - this will present a single-question or a single-section view for the student. You can also try adding a text block after each section notifying the student to stop and take a break:

You can add support materials right into your formative!
🧮 Insert an image of a multiplication chart.
🧮 Embed a calculator (basic, Graphing or Scientific) from ClassCalc.
🧮 Insert video tutorials for instruction.
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A formative written can easily be copied and modified for any student.
📍Copy a formative
📍Rename the formative - e.g. "Dividing Decimals Purple Group"
📍Modify the formative to meet student needs - e.g. reduce answer choices on multiple choice questions, add audio, swap out a grade level reading passage for a reading passage on the students' level, add text boxes or videos with additional directions and/or resources, reduce wordiness in math problems, etc.
📍Assign to individuals who need this formative (Silver/Gold feature).

Add standards to your Standards Set on which your students are learning and tag questions with those standards. Monitor progress towards mastery of standards on the Tracker.

🎧 Add audio to any question type so students can both listen to and see the content.
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You can add audio anywhere that you see the "+" symbol. This means that you can read aloud answer options (for example in Multiple Choice or Multiple Selection questions), and send your feedback messages in audio format instead of text.

Video is an option, too! If recording a short video with your webcam is preferable to recording audio, you can select the "Video" option instead of "Audio."

Using video content can sometimes pose an accessibility issue, for example, making videos accessible to the hearing impaired or to presenting videos to an audience speaking a different language.

Formative offers Closed-Captions for videos added using links from YouTube or from Vimeo.

Formative will carry over and present the same CC languages supported for the video on the original platform.

🎤 Students can respond with audio on Audio Response questions, or record a video with their webcam using Video Response questions!

🎤 Students can even use the "Send feedback" feature to respond with audio so they can take the same formative as the rest of the class. Just use their recorded audio "feedback" to grade their answer on any question type, even those that don't support audio responses, such as multiple choice.
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🎤 Students can respond in a variety of ways on Free Response questions. Try adding a "Show Your Work" to a Free Response question for even more options!

Gold plan teachers can set Time limit extensions for students with accommodations.

Gold plan teachers can set an Answer Choices Reduction as a global accommodation for students

Offer a way for your students to take formatives on paper by printing a blank copy