[nabs-l] FW: New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for Visually Impaired Students Available Faster

[Liz Bottner]

FYI. 

Liz 

email: 
liz.bottner at gmail.com 
Visit my livejournal: 
http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com 
Follow me on Twitter: 
http://twitter.com/lizbot 


August 19, 2009, 01:00 PM ET 
New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for Visually Impaired
Students Available Faster
By Marc Beja
While music-recording companies have been fighting people who illegally
share songs, book publishers are looking to expand file-sharing for college
students with print-related disabilities.

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.

Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association
of American Publishers, says the new service will maximize resources and get
students materials faster.

"The publishers have got billions of dollars worth of content. The DSS
offices are trying to get that out as quickly as possible, generally with
very, very tight budgets and small staffs, and the students obviously need
to get it in as timely a fashion as possible, so they're not behind," he
says.

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.

"It's streamlining the work that I do," says Ms. Adams, who serves more than
877 students throughout the University System of Georgia. "All I have to do
is go to one Web site for five different publishers and click a few buttons.
It's a really big timesaver."