[nabs-l] Accessible textbook legislation

[Nicole B. Torcolini]

Excuse my language, but that is ridiculous. In my opinion, publishers of 
textbooks should be required to provide colleges with an electronic copy of 
the book that can be embossed or easily converted into either text or word 
for those of us who read our books on our notetakers. At Stanford, I still 
have to purchase my books, but the OAE usually either has their own to 
destroy or has a file from the publisher. In one case, when the OAE could 
not get the book in time, and I had mine before they did, I let them have my 
book. However, I have never heard of this .mp3 process.

----- 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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