[nabs-l] technology question

[Mike Freeman]

Sean:

I'm not saying scanners have no place.  For my taste, OCr software *still*
isn't sufficiently accurate to satisfy me.  But that's my personal
preference.  Likewise, I think we have to distinguish what type of material
we're dealing with:  scanning works far better for literary material than it
does for texts in the hard sciences although this is slowly changing.

Moreover, either in this post or another, you wrote of having DSS offices do
some scanning.  Frankly, there were no such things when I went to college
and had there been DSS offices then, I'd have stayed as far away from them
as I could and would do so now were I to go back to school.

Electronic searches are fine if you know more-or-less exactly what you're
looking for.  But there's no substitute for human intelligence and the
ability to get the gist of what's on a page either by eye or by touch.  And
yes, I know about skim-reading.

But basically what I'm talking about is not the occasional scan but when
students spend *hours* ripping apart books and scanning them -- hours that
could have been better spent studying something else, especially when ten
minutes with a reader could elicit the required material.

In this connection, it might be instructive to go back and read Peggy
Elliott's Monitor articles about efficient use of readers.

Bottom line is that the best solution is to use the techniques that work the
best for you.  But sometimes, just as when people try to make us use sight
we don't have, we ourselves fall into ruts and don't use all technologies or
resources (including readers) to best advantage.

Cheers!

Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Sean Whalen
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 9:35 AM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] technology question

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

 

 

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