New program for visually impaired students - AccessText
By Paul Biba
This is from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
AccessText, a new service that rolled out a beta version this week, has created an online database that makes it simpler for disability-student services at colleges to track down alternative forms of course materials from book publishers. When electronic versions don’t exist for a particular book, the college would get permission to scan the pages so a student could either make the font larger, or use other text-to-speech or refreshable Braille reading devices. …
While the program is in its beta stage until next year, 367 offices are testing it free of charge, and eight publishers that are part of the association are footing the bill. When AccessText goes live in July 2010, members will pay between $375 and $500, on a sliding scale based on the institution’s size. At that point, Mr. Hildebrand hopes that colleges will be able to share materials with other approved institutions, with permission, instead of several schools duplicating efforts by scanning books that another member may already have.
Dawn V. Adams, digital-media-accessibility specialist at the Alternative Media Access Center at the University of Georgia, has been the first person to try out AccessText. With the new program, she says she is able to get books easier than she has in the past, and the turnaround for receiving an answer from a book publisher is as fast as before, if not faster.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
They don’t need to “get permission” to adapt a printed book to a specialized format for a person with a print disability, at least in several countries, including the U.S. Now, as this is an unnecessary restriction (why a “special” format?), it is indeed true they need permission to scan it into e.g. HTML or ASCII. Which they’ll do a lousy job of anyway.
A database of lousy scans is more helpful than no E-book at all, but only marginally.