Rara Avis is a private rainforest nature reserve in Costa Rica. They are working hard to develop sustainable ways of using natural rainforests in order to help conserve them for future generations.

Tools for Inclusion commissioned Twan Leenders at Rara Avis to develop the Rainforest website as a resource for British schools. They also commissioned Widgit to create the accessible symbols site to facilitate inclusion of pupils with special needs.

The site is now available in Spanish and Dutch

Tools for Inclusion

Level 1 has general information on rainforests and the plants and animals that live there.

Level 2 describes the destruction of the rainforests, logging, alternative farming.

Level 3 is on sustainability and how we can conserve this essential world resource.

The symbol site has been designed to have easy navigation and is switch accessible.

The site has been designed to be fully switch accessible, with no setting up required. When the mouse or switch scan covers the big buttons they are highlighted.

The scroll bar is highlighted red to make it easier to find.

No page is longer than 2 screen heights so that the reader can read a reasonable quantity of information, but still have easy navigation.

Additional resources for schools: An off-line version will be available to save on-line costs, and for use on computers not directly connected to the Internet. PDF files will be available with the symbol texts for students to read. And the new symbols used in the site will be available to download.