Role: Writing, design, web development
The Challenge
Special education is exceedingly complex. To effectively work with their children’s schools, families must master federal and state laws and regulations while also learning about the specific procedures and departments of their school district. Boston Public Schools asked the Federation for Children with Special Needs to help them provide a more family-friendly guide that could capture the details of their staff-focused Special Education policy and procedure manual without being so dry and overwhelming.
Collaborators
FCSN colleagues led a series of co-design sessions with Boston Special Education families and interviewed special education administrators and family engagement professionals to help shape the “Family Guide.”
Then, my collegues created an outline and provided a draft to me to edit and design into a family-friendly resource created using the Articulate platform.
Colleagues also researched accessibility features of various learning platforms, eventually settling on Articulate as the most disability-inclusive option.
Team members also recruited cultural brokers (language speakers and leaders within the largest cultural groups in Boston) to provide input into how topics should be framed and to review translations and designs for accuracy and cultural relevance.
My Contributions
Drawing on my expertise in crafting family-friendly language, I edited these drafts together – resolving differences in style and in some cases expanding or condensing content. My goal was to follow the priorities articulated in the co-design sessions while also ensuring that best practices in Plain Language writing were applied.
Additionally, I used images and design features to visually “chunk” the information and provide multiple means to access the information.
Once I established the template in English, we divided the work of cutting/pasting translations into the template in a variety of languages. Because I am more comfortable working with multilingual communications than the rest of the team, I took on the languages that are most unlike English – including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Arabic.
At this point, we discovered that Articulate was not able to handle the Arabic language. I therefore crafted a Google Sites version, working closely with a family engagement specialist and Arabic speaker who worked with us as a contractor.