[nabs-l] Accessible textbook legislation

[Justin Ekis]

Joseph,

I'll do some checking myself since I should know what's happening here in 
California before I start school. But if you want more details on what 
you're referring to in California, you might send this to the cabs list as 
well, maybe someone there knows more about it.
 cabs-talk at nfbnet.org

Hope this helps, and I may write again in a day or so.

Justin

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "T. Joseph Carter" <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com>
To: "NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List" <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Cc: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 8:26 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] 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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