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The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the spread of accessible e-books, especially ones of STEM much more in developing countries, an efficient/systematic scheme to localize tools for producing/reading them should be established. Furthermore, even in many advanced countries, Print-disabled people still do not have a good tool to write a content including technical notations such as mathematical formulas in their own local language. This work is aimed at giving a practical solution for those problems.

Here, multilingual support in a tool to produce accessible STEM contents and its new localization scheme are discussed.

It is shown that the accessible STEM-document editor can be customized easily for print-disabled people so that they can read and author a material including complicated technical notations in their own local language. The localization for Vietnamese and other various languages actually has been worked on.

The Vietnamese version was completed, and some prototype versions for the other languages were also given. It is expected that the software can contribute to improve STEM accessibility much more in many countries.

This research seeks to fill a gap in the service and retailing marketplace experience literature as well as retailing practice by extending Attribution and Expectancy Disconfirmation Theories to the large and growing market of consumers with vision disabilities. It reveals how accessibility-related service failures with a retailer's website can lead to anti-firm reactions from blind and low vision consumers, including social media sharing, negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) and avoidance of the retailer's other sales channels even if they are accessible.

Blind respondents were recruited from national blindness organizations to participate in this study using a within-subjects design to test reactions to accessibility-related propositions in two different scenarios involving varying degrees of effort.

In both high- and low-effort conditions, an accessibility-related service failure leads to the anti-firm consequences of NWOM, social media sharing and avoidance of the retailer's sales channels. Additionally, blind and low vision consumers who also feel inaccessible websites are discriminatory develop stronger anti-firm attitudes toward the offending retailers. Further, we aver that the retailer's entire website including all its features, not just the homepage, should be made accessible to the growing market of vision-impaired consumers and thereby obtain substantial competitive advantages.

This research pertains to the service failure and recovery nomological network. It extends the existing paradigm to include accessibility-related service failures experienced by consumers with disabilities into the specialized category of discrimination-based service failures in instances where service recovery is not easily achieved. Empirical investigations of these experiences have been rare, despite the frequency with which they occur.

Black Panther depicted a positive representation of Black culture. The film transcended Black minds to believe in power, excellence, and intelligence. Black youth posted images on social media using the Wakanda pose as a symbol of pride. The film not only countered the stereotypical generalized ideologies of African culture, values, and customs, but it capsized false narratives by including the historical context of Black scientist with a female character. Articles summarizing depictions of Black Panther and its influence on Black youth assert that the character of Shuri and her perfection of the sciences contributed to pathways for young Black girls to join science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. Other factors contribute to the increase of Black girls in STEM programs, but the image of Shuri's character in a position of power of the sciences pinpoints representation as key to cerebral pictures and reflections of Black female excellence in the sciences. However, representation is minimal among Black male youth in STEM programs.

Although it is true that African American male youth have Black male representation in media through sports figures, rappers, and hip-hop artists, inquiring minds need to know that Black male representation in the sciences and mathematics is the formula to how young minds view themselves and their relation to the world. Accordingly, this underrepresentation of Black male youth in STEM programs leads to the big “what if” question. If LeBron James conducted a critical analysis using physics and mathematics to make a 3-point shot, then what is the likelihood that young Black males' interest in the STEM programs would increase?

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether having accessible cybersecurity programs (CPs) for high-school students affected girls’ long-term engagement with the industry, given that they already had interests in technology. Although much research has been done to evaluate how high-school science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs retain girls in computing fields, it is necessary to see if this same long-term engagement exists in cybersecurity-specific programs.

In total, 55 members were surveyed from the aspirations in computing community regarding their experience in and accessibility to high-school CPs. A quantitative analysis of such responses was then undertaken using inferential statistical tools and chi-squared tests for independence.

The results showed that the existence of CPs alone are not influential factors in increasing long-term engagement with the field, showcasing that the high-knowledge barrier of CPs affects many students (even those with prior interests in technology). Instead, by having multiple occurrences of these programs and providing more cybersecurity resources to areas that lacked them, girls were more likely to report an increased interest in the field.

Such information can support future program leaders to develop effective, accessible and more targeted cybersecurity initiatives for students of various communities.

By analyzing the unique interactions of tech-aspiring women with cybersecurity, this exploration was able to demonstrate that women of different computing experiences face a shared barrier when entering the cybersecurity field. Likewise, in comparing these perspectives across different age groups, the investigation highlighted the development and subsequent growth of cybersecurity programming over the years and why such initiatives should be supported into the future.

A goal of integrated reporting (IR) under the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’s leadership is to provide clearly written, comprehensible and accessible information. In light of this objective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the readability and accessibility of integrated reports, an issue magnified by the IIRC’s continual commitment to clear and readable report language, and its intention for IR to become the corporate reporting norm.

In a whole text software facilitated analysis, the study utilises readability measures and supplementary measures of reader accessibility in a multi-year analysis of a large sample of global integrated reports sourced from the IIRC examples database.

The findings highlight the low readability of analysed integrated reports and indicate that readability is not improving. The supplementary measures suggest sub-optimal use of visual communication forms and overuse of structural presentation techniques which may contribute to reader accessibility of the analysed reports.

The study extends readability analysis to an emerging corporate reporting phenomenon and its findings contribute to the growing IR literature. The study applies supplementary measures of reader accessibility which advance the methods available to assess the communication efficacy of integrated and other corporate reports.

The analysis of the readability and accessibility of integrated reports in the study indicates that the IIRC’s goal of clear, comprehensible and accessible reporting is not reflected by reporters’ practices. This has implications for the IIRC, reporting organisations, report readers and regulators.

The study represents the first large-scale analysis of the readability and accessibility of global integrated reports.

A review of current initiatives to increase science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) achievement among American youth and young adults reveals the presence of “IQism”. That is, whether such interventions are directed toward low-income minorities and/or the disproportionate number of higher-income youth who have selected liberal arts majors over an STEM major, the country has reserved STEM as a field for “the best and the brightest”. Utilizing the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, this article argues that STEM content is accessible to all students including those whose first language is informal rather than formal English. Based upon these premises, this conceptual paper aims to introduce the framework of Teaching STEM as a Second Language as a strategy for elevating STEM achievement among students who would otherwise be excluded from the STEM movement.

This paper utilizes a review of both classic and current literature on second language acquisition to identify strategies that can be adopted by STEM instructors to increase STEM achievement among youth and young adults who are viewed as “average” and/or “below-average” academic performers.

Using quotes that confirm the thesis that STEM subject matter has been historically viewed as the domain of those whose cognitive skills place them among the “best and the brightest”, the second language acquisition (SLA) strategy of “scaffolding” is introduced as a pedagogy for producing “comprehensible output” when STEM content is taught to students whose first language is informal English. Constructivism, a concept currently used to guide the teaching of STEM contents is introduced as a framework that merges best practices in STEM and SLA. Using Cummins’ (1991) Common Underlying Proficiency Model, other strategies are also proposed for exporting SLA pedagogies and approaches to elevate equity in the quest to improve STEM achievement levels among youth and adults in the USA.

SLA theories and concepts have not been applied as a potential tool for teaching STEM. This is a unique and powerful lens that can be used to more effectively support the needs of underrepresented populations.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive review and bibliometric analysis of the literature in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education over the past 15 years, with a specific focus on global distribution and research trends.

This study collected 1,718 documents from the Web of Science (WOS) database and analyzed their timeline distribution, geographical distribution, research topics, subject areas, learning stages and citation burst using a bibliometric approach with VOSviewer and Citespace.

Results indicated that: overall, STEM education has increasingly gained scholarly attention and is developing diversely by emphasizing interdisciplinary, cross-domain and regional collaboration. In terms of global collaboration, a collaborative network with the USA in the center is gradually expanding to a global scope. In terms of research themes, four key topics can be outlined including educational equity, pedagogy, empirical effects and career development. Social, cultural and economic factors influence the way STEM education is implemented across different countries. The developed Western countries highlighted educational equity and disciplinary integration, while the developing countries tend to focus more on pedagogical practices. As for research trends, eastern countries are emphasizing humanistic leadership and cultural integration in STEM education; in terms of teachers’ professional development, teachers’ abilities of interdisciplinary integration, technology adoption and pedagogy application are of the greatest importance. With regards to pedagogy, the main focus is for developing students’ higher-order abilities. In terms of education equity, issues of gender and ethnicity were still the hottest topics, while the unbalanced development of STEM education across regions needs further research.

This study provides a global landscape of STEM education along the timeline, which illustrates the yearly progressive development of STEM education and indicates the future trends.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the parameters of the duty of reasonable adjustment to facilitate access to e‐learning resources.

Educational providers continue to develop new methods of delivering content in digital format, the increasing use of broadband, web‐based resources and new content creation software provides numerous methods of delivering excellence in content creation and delivery. It is important that this excellence is available to all; to this end the disability aspects of e‐learning provision are discussed in this paper, specifically relating to a anticipatory “duty of reasonable adjustment” to facilitate access to computer‐based learning resources within the UK education sector.

The paper concludes that the concept of reasonable adjustment is likely to remain unclear within the current statutory framework, is dynamic in relation to e‐learning software applications, and will continue to increase in scope and complexity as advanced software applications are used on a larger scale in the education sector.

After relating general accessibility approaches to the various open and proprietary source software applications and the concept of “lock in,” the paper argues that knowledge of reasonable adjustment is optimally considered in the early planning stage of development rather than after implementation, under the legislatively mandated anticipatory model. Further conclusions are presented which propose that the approaches described can be scaled up to provide general themes, which benefits the full spectrum of disability alongside the wider student cohort.

Further work is discussed and includes a potential UK extension of the analysis presented by Scroggins in 2007 concerning measurement and structural modeling of reasonableness under the provisions of the US Rehabilitation Act of 1998 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Many psychological, cultural, and social barriers exist that impact Black male participation in the workforce. In this chapter, authors discuss the impact that mentorship, racism, society, culture, economics, and other pertinent factors have on the career development of Black men. This chapter examines programs and strategies that effectively address the career development needs of Black men. A review of counseling interventions and their applicability to career counseling with Black men are presented. Emerging trends in career development for Black men are also discussed. In addition, provided in this chapter are personal narratives given by the authors who contextualize their career development experiences through culturally-specific career development theoretical frameworks. Lastly, implications for research, counseling, counselor education, and policy, as well as recommendations for professional development are offered.

This study offers an understanding of vulnerable populations' experiences of actual use of mobile banking and their expectations of mobile banking (MB).

Data were generated from MB customers and bankers using online reviews, focus groups and semi-structured interviews, as a mix of methods and sources can provide rich and in-depth understanding.

The affordance of MB for vulnerable populations is explained in four concepts: meaning, material, competency and usability. Recommendations that could further engage and improve the service quality of MB apps for vulnerable populations include customization and personalization of services, access to the digital health data of members of vulnerable populations, audio-based option selection and touchscreen options, and enhancement of service and performance standards.

It is suggested that retail bankers should improve the service quality and performance of their MB apps by considering the recommendations drawn from vulnerable people's experiences. This study discusses implications for retailers.

This study applied social practice theory and affordance of technology theory to understand how those in vulnerable populations experienced MB apps; the results could be used to improve the accessibility, performance and service quality of MB apps.