[nabs-l] Publishers and EPub problems

Mon Sep 14 23:36:13 UTC 2015

Kaiti,

What a problem. I've taken electives for a few years at our local community 
college called Nova for short; northern virginia community college.
At Nova, we also have a accessibility issues with the library site. Library 
services says they cannot change the website; they say it is
IT's job to do that and design the website, and from what I've heard from 
the AT coordinator, the web design team knows about the problems but fails 
to make changes.
Disability services is well aware of the problems too, from day 1.

Keep in mind that the school can only fix the website. They cannot make 
databases accessible because databases are accessed via a third party 
vendor. For instance if you access Opposing viewpoints, the vendor is Gale 
who runs the database.

I am afraid at this late time in the semester, the third week or fourth week 
depending on when you started, you will find it impossible to catch up with 
reading at the pace classes go in college. You might see if you can drop the 
class and get your money back as long as this does not jeopardize your full 
time status.

I've often used readers; old fashioned, but it works; and I record them on a 
vr stream or digital recorder.

Other than getting a reader, I'm not sure what to tell you.

What is the database and book? If I can access it through Nova or another 
nearby school, I'll see what I can do if anything.
Some ideas you might try are these:

1. Is there an older edition of the book either in print or ebook you can 
use that is less expensive? Maybe learning Ally or bookshare might have an 
earlier version back when it was hard copy.
2. Could you ask around school and either borrow or buy an earlier copy of 
the book? Maybe a student has their old copy still and you can use it. 
Either scan the book or use a reader; or maybe your DSS office will scan it.
3. Could you buy the book used from somewhere at a lesser price? Amazon and 
ebay have used books and many other places too.
4. Could you rent the ebook? Sometimes I think that is an option.
5. If you decide you want to buy it, ask the publisher for some sample pages 
and they can email you them or put them in something like drop box.
This way you can sample the book and see if it works. You could also see if 
anyone has bought the book and try jaws out on their machine if you download 
a jaws demo.
6. Have you tried doing the jaws OCR feature on the book? Sometimes this 
works on scanned images.
7. Try copy and pasting the text into a Word file or have someone do that 
for you if its not interfacing with the keyboard.

I've not had a required book online before but I've had several ebooks from 
the school library which I wanted to use for research but could not with 
accessibility issues. Its quite a pain.

Good luck!
Ashley
-----Original Message----- 
From: Kaiti Shelton via nabs-l
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2015 12:27 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Cc: Kaiti Shelton
Subject: [nabs-l] Publishers and EPub problems

Hi all,

I recently posted about an Epub file textbook that I am using.  While
this is a separate issue, it is dealing with the same publishing
company.

A publisher for a lot of my textbooks is moving away from selling
print editions of their books, and instead is moving towards selling
the Ebook versions from their web site.  I'm in a situation now where
a textbook I need for one of my classes is very big and very
expensive.  In order to save the class money and from having to cary
the book around, the professor is letting everyone access the book
electronically through the university's library database, which of
course is not accessible to me with NVDA or JAWS.

I've been battling the library for the past 2 years because this
obviously hinders my ability to research, but they say it's
E-learning's job to make the databases accessible, E-learning says
their focus is on our sakai site and they have nothing to do with the
library stuff, and disability services has known about it from day one
but hasn't backed me up or applied pressure on either department to
fix itso that's obviously a huge problem.  In any case, the real issue
is that supposedly the publisher does not have a publisher file like
they would for a print textbook that they can send to my disability
services office.

I did submit an alternative format request to the disability services
office so they could make me a copy of the book.  When they found out
the publisher supposedly had no file to give them (apparently they say
they can't get the Ebook and convert it) they said we'd have to go on
through the library database and get the book from there.  The problem
with this is that only 60 pages can be coppied at a time, which is
severely delaying this process.  The disability services office also
appears to be understaffed this semester, so I've been receiving
things behind my syllabus schedule.  When I drop off documents in hard
copy they take upwards of four or five business days to be done
instead of hours like they were before, and when I call to say, "I
dropped off this or sent in a request for pages 1-25 in my textbook
from the library database a few days ago and my class is tomorrow
afternoon," I'm just told that they'll hopefully get to my conversion
soon.  It is now the middle of September and I'm going to classes
without having read required material because I don't have it.  My
professors are starting to become less understanding, and I don't want
them to see the lack of preparation as something I caused for myself
rather than an issue with getting the materials I need.

There are several problems with this, but specifically with the
textbook I don't know what to do.  I am tempted to buy the Ebook and
just take care of it myself, but it is very expensive and may/may not
work with my technology depending on how it is set up, as it was
explained to me in my other thread.  The other issue is that none of
my classmates have needed to pay for their book since they can just go
online.  Of course this would not be a problem if the library would
listen and make their database and web site accessible, but it also
would not be a problem if the publisher would give the DS office some
kind of file.  I thought they were legally bound to do that?

I guess I'm at a loss for what to do.  This is a high 300 level
theories seminar-style course and I need to have my readings to
actively participate.  I've told the ds office at this point to just
scan documents and run the pdfs through robobraille and send them to
me without significant editing just so I have the materials.  I feel
like I'm advocating with them to get my stuff done but I'm not being
successful, the library has not been successful either as everyone
seems to be passing the buck and DS hasn't backed me up even though
they are aware of the issue and have been since I brought it to their
attention 2 years ago, and I feel like I want to try to contact the
publisher, but doubt hearing from a student rather than the disability
professional will do anything.  I guess I'm just frustrated and at a
loss as to where I should go from here to get my materials in a timely
manner so I can do my work.

-- 
Kaiti Shelton
University of Dayton-Music Therapy
President, Ohio Association of Blind Students 2013-Present
Secretary, The National Federation of the Blind Performing Arts
Division 2015-2016

"You can live the life you want; blindness is not what holds you back!"

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