[blindlaw] Accessible textbook legislation

[Russell J. Thomas, Jr.]

You might find the following URL helpful, although it appears that the site
may not have been updated for a while.

www.tsbvi.edu/textbooks/

-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of T. Joseph Carter
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 8:27 PM
To: NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List
Cc: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [blindlaw] Accessible textbook legislation

Hi all,

We're getting ready for our state legislative seminar here in Oregon 
and I suggested to my state president that the problem of accessible 
textbooks here in Oregon is abysmal at best.  He thinks he knows who 
I should talk to here in Oregon about that, if I can get a good 
example of textbook legislation to work from.  This is, I realize, a 
national problem.  Some universities solve it well enough, but the 
closest to that at an Oregon university is the direct result of my 
intervention.

I'd like to push my state to adopt accessible textbook standards.  Is 
there a good template out there from which I can work?  I am told 
California does not allow its universities to use textbooks that 
cannot be obtained in an accessible electronic format.  That might be 
a good starting place.  *grin*

While I am sure readers on this list and over on nabs-l (Cc'd) are 
aware of what I mean by abysmal, I'll describe the standard process 
used here in Oregon anyway:

1. Students buy the books at retail price (hundreds of dollars).  
Books cannot be purchased early, and must be carried several blocks 
to the DSO.
2. Students deliver their books to their university's DSO.
3. The DSO sends the book to the university print shop to cut up the 
book.
4. The cut book is returned to the DSO.
5. The DSO scans the book using a B&W xerox machine at about 150 dpi.
6. These scans are fed into an antiquated version of OCR software 
such as ABBYY FineReader.
7. ODS sends the book out to be "rebound" with a plastic comb.
8. The poorly OCR'd text is edited by hand at least a little bit, in 
theory.
9. These lightly edited poor OCRs of textbooks are read using a 
"natural" voice into mp3 files.
10. The student must come to the DSO to collect their mangled 
textbooks and mp3 CDs, usually about the third week of an 11 week 
quarter.

The process often _begins_ the first day of the term, because books 
are not available any sooner than that.

The mp3 CDs are next to useless since they are computer-read versions 
of badly scanned text, full of errors and lacking anything resembling 
interpretations of diagrams.  The printed books come back with pages 
missing, out of order, torn, and otherwise destroyed.  I am told that 
my DSO spends an average of four hours editing a moderately sized 
textbook once scanned, and the new person who spends the four hours 
produces significantly better output in that time frame than her 
predecessor, but it's still pretty bad no matter how you look at it.

The cost to the university is more than a day's pay for someone per 
book.  The student's cost is several hundred dollars in destroyed 
books, and this is standard policy at five higher educational 
institutions I am aware of in my state.

One of these is developing better policies based on my efforts, but 
the better policies are meeting with lukewarm reactions by students 
because as bad as the current system is, it doesn't involve waiting a 
month for the publishers to finally respond that they don't have or 
won't provide the textbook in question.

And while some might argue that a blind student should be responsible 
for scanning their own books, a more-than-full-time student does not 
often have that luxury.  When you consider the reading volume 
required for graduate studies, that's just not feasible.  Publishers 
will not provide electronic copies to students, only to DSOs, only 
when a student who needs it has registered for the class and 
purchased a book and not always even then.

This must stop.  The publishers should be routinely providing 
electronic copies to DSOs as soon as they receive book orders so that 
the electronic books are available to the DSO immediately to begin 
doing whatever they need to in order to adapt the book from a clean, 
correct, digital source.

With the right pointers, I intend to do all that I can to make sure 
it stops here in Oregon.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Joseph

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