[Cabs-talk] FW: [Youth-outreach] Textbooks for disabled, Particularly College Students

[Angela fowler]

David Andrews posted this on the Youth Outreach list, thought I'd pass it
on. 
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>Textbooks for the Disabled
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>August 28, 2009
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>The Association of American Publishers and the University of Georgia 
>this week unveiled an electronic database aimed at making it easier for 
>blind, dyslexic and otherwise impaired college students to get 
>specialized textbooks in time for classes.
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>The database, called <http://www.accesstext.org/>AccessText, is 
>designed to centralize the process by which electronic versions of 
>textbooks are requested by colleges and supplied by publishers.
>Experts say it will allow disabled students to get their textbooks more 
>efficiently, help colleges save money and avoid lawsuits, and protect 
>publishers' copyrights.
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>For students whose disabilities prevent them from using traditional 
>texts, the normally straightforward task of acquiring books for their 
>courses can be tedious and frustrating. Federal law requires that 
>colleges and universities provide disabled students equal access to 
>educational materials, but this is often easier said than done. College 
>officials have to track down and contact the publisher of every 
>textbook that each of its disabled students buys and request an 
>electronic copy. If such a copy exists -- the likelihood shrinks the 
>older the book and the smaller the publisher -- college officials still 
>have to convert the file to a format that can be read by whatever 
>reading aid the student uses. If not, the college has to wait, 
>sometimes weeks, to obtain permission to scan the book and create its 
>own electronic version.
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>Once a college has an electronic copy, converting to a readable format 
>can be another complex process, says Sean Keegan, associate director of 
>assistive technology at Stanford University. Math and science texts 
>often arrive as scanned pages, and cannot always be easily read by the 
>character-recognition software the university uses to turn them into 
>standard electronic files, Keegan says. "That can take a longer amount 
>of time to process that material internally and turn it around and give 
>that to the student efficiently," he says.
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>Meanwhile, delays in the process can make it impossible for disabled 
>students to prepare for and participate in classes. "Students need to 
>have a book in time so they can do the assigned reading and study for 
>tests and papers," says Gaeir Dietrich, interim director of high-tech 
>training for the California Community Colleges system. "So if the book 
>doesn't come until the term has been in session for three or four 
>weeks, that puts that student very far behind." Some students have sued 
>colleges over such delays, she says.
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>AccessText aims to mitigate these woes by streamlining the request and 
>delivery process, says Ed McCoyd, executive director for accessibility 
>affairs at AAP.
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>"There's a lot of transactional friction taking place currently," 
>says McCoyd. "What AccessText is trying to do is take some of that out 
>of the transaction by having parties agree to streamlined rules up front."
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>Having colleges submit requests using the AccessText portal should 
>eliminate the need for the publishers to require endless paperwork with 
>each request to protect its copyrights, McCoyd says. Under the system, 
>the copyright protection agreements can be handled once, during 
>registration, and the requester's bona fides can be verified by a 
>log-in.
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>Currently, colleges that get tired of waiting for publishers to process 
>the paperwork and procure an electronic copy of a text sometimes just 
>scan a text themselves to try to satisfy the needs of disabled students 
>in a timely fashion, says Dietrich.
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>AccessText is also set up to eliminate the need for different colleges 
>to convert the same text to a readable format once it is acquired. 
>Currently "numerous schools could be doing the exact same thing, 
>converting the same text," says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director 
>for higher education at the publishers' association. Under the new 
>system, "if one school has already spent the time and the money to 
>convert a file to a format, they could advise the AccessText network, 
>which could then make the info available that it was still available in 
>that format, and that school could share it with another school" -- 
>thereby sparing those colleges the time and resources it would have 
>used to convert the file themselves, he says.
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>Eight major publishing houses paid a total of just under $1 million to 
>develop the AccessText network and maintain it through its beta phase, 
>which will end next July. From then on, it will sustain itself by 
>billing member colleges between $375 and $500 annually, depending on 
>size.
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>Dietrich notes that community colleges might not benefit from the 
>AccessText network as much as other institutions, since "we have a lot 
>more vocational classes and basic-skills classes, and a lot of those 
>books don't come through those big publishers, they come through 
>specialized publishers," she says. "It doesn't solve that part of the 
>problem for us."
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>The network includes 92 percent of all college textbook publishers and 
>is recruiting even more, according to AAP officials.

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