[nabs-l] my literature text update

Mon Feb 23 02:51:54 UTC 2015

Hello Ashley,

I am sorry to hear you are having trouble accessing the contents of the electronic files of the textbook your college sent you. The Norton anthologies are generally large collections of literature.

I do not know if all Norton anthologies are set up the same, but the one I used had the name of the author followed by some information about the author before the piece of literature written by the author. However, the next author did not appear at the top of the next page, but rather placed on the page wherever the last selection ended. Perhaps your anthology may be set up the same way.

Do the letters that appear after the dashes in the file titles match up with any of the names of the authors? I would probably check this first before contacting the disabilities office to find out what type of system they used for labeling the files. Although, since you may not be reading every selection from the anthology, I would compare it to your reading list.

If you are using a computer running Windows 7 on it, you could probably use the search box that appears in the start menu to search for your reading assignments. I would try typing the name of the author in the search box. It will search your entire computer to find a match to your entry. I know you could search different drives when searching in Windows XP, but I do not have any experience doing this in Windows 7. Perhaps you could try typing the letter of the drive followed by a colon and a slash before your search entry to see if this would search a different drive other than the hard drive of your computer.

As far as working with PDF files goes, I really do not like working with them all that much. Usually I will convert the PDF file into a text file to make it easier to use. You can do this by selecting the save as text in the file menu.

As far as following along with the text in class goes, I was never really good at doing this using a Victor Stream. This is what I used because it was the only piece of technology I had to use at the time. I found trying to look up various passages from the text to be rather distracting in terms of being able to follow along with the class discussion.

I would usually read the piece of literature a day or two before we discussed it in class. I felt like I was able to remember enough of what I read to be able to take part in the class discussions. When taking notes, I would jot down the page number along with a few words from the passage so I could find it later after class. My professor would always read selected passages aloud to the entire class, and although this is not the same as being able to refer to my own copy, I felt as though this worked well for me.

Finally, if you are really having trouble with the electronic files of your anthology textbook, I would encourage you to look up the individual pieces of literature on Bookshare and BARD. I found this to be rather useful when I was not able to get one of my anthology textbooks at the beginning of one of my classes. Perhaps it might not be possible to find all of the selections you will be reading this way, but you should be able to find most of them.

Anyway, I hope some of this helps you.  I am sure that with a bit of hard work that you will be successful in passing this class.

Best of luck,
Elizabeth

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Ashley Bramlett via nabs-l
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2015 6:02 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Cc: Andrew Tompkins
Subject: [nabs-l] my literature text update

Hi all,

Here is an update on the literature text.
As you might recall, I was in the process of requesting my book in electronic format.
I do have learning ally version, but find half the readers to be hard to follow and the quality could be better.
Many of you suggested having the electronic copy so I could read it and navigate it to find quotes, spelling, and read along in class.

I have mostly bad news.
The Norton Anthology of short fiction is huge, and I sure wish it was on bookshare.

The good news is I was able to download dropbox and get the files.
They put the files in a shared folder for me.
They just left the files, no labels on them or anything; so the labels are a string of numbers.

But here is the bad news.
The only solution I can think of is having the dss staff put the files in order and label what pages are for each file.

Well the news in short is that there are so many files and its out of order and worst of all, jaws does not read all page numbers. This makes it impossible to navigate and know where I am. It is not reading all page numbers in the pdf files because some page numbers are at the bottom of a page. I at first thought they were absent, but my dad looked at it, and saw they were labeled but at different points of the page.

I did not put it on a flash drive to read on my braille note, because I cannot navigate it. if a professor says, turn to page 12, I have literally seconds to do that, and would have no clue which file to use.

Several issues with this arrangement.
1. With over 30 files, I have no idea which one to open to read a given story.
I have the title, author and page numbers for my assignments, but that does not help. I cannot search this many files, and I do not think there is a way to search all files in a folder at once. I can only search one by one wich is counterproductive.
If you know of a way to search across files, let me know. They are all in my folder and I will copy them to  a USB drive and place them in a folder called norton text. But, I don’t think the pc can see all files to search them.
2. You all mentioned copying and pasting for quotes and highlights of the text.
This does not work. I highlight the text with regular key commands like shift down arrow to highlight a line, and then copy and paste.
It only copies a word or two; jaws tells me the whole line is selected.

3.  I cannot search by page. This is since each file starts at page 1 in the computer’s eyes; like it may be 1-20 or 1-45 depending on the size of the file. Yes, different files have different page amounts ranging from 8 to about 50.
But page 1 is not page 1. It is continuing the book. so page 1 is really page 222 or something like that. I hope this makes since. I may be on say page 80 of the text but when you look at the go to page number command, it tells you,  you are at page 5 for instance.
4. Some stories begin at the end of a page. I cannot skim it. I cannot tell where one story ends, and the next begins.

I think this arrangement of so many files with only labels of numbers is useless.
Each file begins with the name 27313 followed by a dash with more letters.

This is not working for me.
I plan to ask the dss counselor for help such as labeling the files with page numbers or putting them in order at the very least.

I’ve never! encountered such a problem. If I used publisher files, which is rare, I see them in a handful of files and they are in order.
More often, my university converted them to word, so I did not deal with such issues. But the community college where I’m taking the elective did nothing to make this user friendly.

Just thought I’d explain my situation.

Any advice?

If I did not have the learning ally book which I is not always helpful, I’d drop the class.
I’m not being accomodated properly. Yet, I’ll do what I can to do the readinv with the audio book and finding stories online. I am enjoying the class overall and like exploring the themes of the stories despite not being accomodated. I have no book to look at in class. so I have to ask a classmate to read passages quietly to me when he says to look at a certain passage.
They do that to help me out. I contribute to discussions always and hope they are good ideas. I’m sure I’m getting my participation points. But, I’d sure feel more equal if I had the book with me.

Thanks for reading this somewhat  of a rant.

Ashley
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