[blindkid] Elementary School iPad Experience

[Richard Holloway]

Interesting link. That plan mentions iPads (and similar tablets) as well as laptops, or some combination of the two as potential solutions. 

I would like to think that they would plan ahead enough to use accessible source material, but I'm inclined to mention that here in Georgia, our county has gone to a number of web-based text books for at least a couple of years now. We have not been overly impressed with the result.

The school sounded sort of excited for Kendra at first because it would offer her access. Turns out that really isn't the case. Sure, the web site reads aloud, but JAWS cannot manage the site content, and her Apex is entirely useless to access the sites. They did load at least one electronic text book onto her Apex last semester. Turns out they managed not to provide any page numbers at all in the book-- a rather important oversight. All Kendra could so was search for a unique passage to jump to the right section. It was really frustrating, and use of this text was quickly abandoned.

Back to the web access for text books-- there's no way for Kendra to access the buttons to select playback. We can start playback for her, but the reading stops at fairly random locations and needs sighted assistance to restart. Reality is she shouldn't even need our help to start reading at all. Any typical, sighted 10-year-old can open a text or go to a web page and click start with no help at all. Most importantly (at least in our case) is the fact that JAWS doesn't see the content as accessible text, so there is no braille access on a braille display.

Reading and listening are two different kinds of learning. Sighted kids with electronic access to these materials have access to read or listen in many cases. They also have full access to photos and illustrations. With present technology, tactile access to graphics and photos is pretty much nonexistent for a web site. Even worse. many of the web sites go out of their way to limit ways to capture and adapt graphics. Best case, there is some sort of caption or alternative description to say, "This is a photo of a statue of President Lincoln", or the like. Then again, with conventional texts, we often find non-text content to be ignored or at best, very minimally described.

I have also tried to capture text and move that to a more accessible situation for Kendra from these web textbooks. The sites have generally disabled that option, presumably to guard their copyright? Apart from some absurd workaround like screen capture to OCR, I see no solution, and we're not going to deal with hundreds or thousands of screen captures of multi-columned text and try to convert e-books to the text which should already be accessible to begin with.

In our case, we make a point of getting copies of the texts in both braille and print whenever possible, though sometimes they are (we are told) simply not available. My assumption is they will become less and less available in the future as well. If you're working with braille and print copies at the same time, you're already in a confusing situation with page numbers. Electronic breaks with web-based materials, combined with trying to be in a physical location by a computer, and a braillenote (etc,.) plus print and braille books, and sometimes a brailler and an abacus or two, (etc.) seems to make this transitional state between the print/braille materials and the electronic realm an interesting logistical challenge.

Does anyone know who or what regulates, or at least guides accessibility in terms of electronic text books?

On Jan 28, 2013, at 12:44 PM, DrV wrote:

> One of the topics I heard on the way in to work today was that LAUSD is
> thinking about providing tablet devices to all 650,000 students in the
> district. I googled & here is the link to an article on the subject:
> www.dailynews.com/news/ci_22437047/plan-supply-lausd-students-apple-ipads-o
> r-other 
> <http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_22437047/plan-supply-lausd-students-apple
> -ipads-or-other>.
> Needless to say, this will affect blind & vi students too.
> EricV