JOURNAL ARTICLE · EDITORIAL BRIEF
Research foci, design features, and accessibility challenges in digital mathematics and geography textbooks: a scoping review
Maxim Brnic; Stefania Torri; Vanessa Macchia; Gilbert Greefrath
Frontiers in Education · 8 October 2026 · Background reading
The finding or development
Digital-textbook research often treats accessibility as support for learning, while giving much less attention to assistive-technology compatibility. Technical approaches concentrated on visual impairments; motor and hearing needs were largely absent.
What supports it
Peer-reviewed scoping review of 78 studies: 73 mathematics and five geography; Web of Science and Scopus searches covering publications through 2025.
Reviewed: Publisher abstract, search and coding methods, results, discussion and limitations; supplementary datasets not reviewed.
Why it matters for design
For education design, distinguish making a lesson understandable from making its controls and representations operable with assistive technology. Both need evaluation.
Read with this in mind
Two databases and two languages limit coverage. Study quality was not appraised; binary coding records mentions rather than depth. Only five geography studies were included, so subject comparisons are fragile. This maps research, not the accessibility of every textbook.
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DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1945428
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