[nabs-l] technology question

[Sean Whalen]

With an electronic version of a text you can skip extraneous material as
well, and you decide what is extraneous. You can navigate by sentence,
paragraph, page, or read in skim mode. You can also search for particular
words or phrases much more quickly than can any human. Yes, the scanning
takes time, but that time is more than made up for by the ability to read
the material significantly faster than you can listen to another person read
it aloud. Making the process time efficient may require a quicker scanner,
but those are not too difficult to come by. Also, most DSS offices will do
scanning for students. I think that is fine as long as students are prepared
to pick up the slack and do it ourselves if DSS falls through.

 

Surely there are benefits to working with a reader, but the mere fact that
there are some benefits doesn't make it the better choice. I don't think it
should, or has to be, an either or, but if I could choose only one or the
other, it would be scanning and OCR hands down. The point with which I
disagree, and please correct me if this is not what you are saying, is that
students would be better off forgetting about scanning and simply using
readers. That is simply a less efficient approach, and takes more control
out of the hands of the blind student.

 

Sean