[nfbwatlk] New Text Book Agreement

[Mike Freeman]

It's a start!

Mke

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alco Canfield" <amcanfield at comcast.net>
To: <nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2009 3:12 PM
Subject: [nfbwatlk] New Text Book Agreement


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Thought you would find this interesting.
httpcc//wwwddinsidehigheredddcom/news/blebjji/jh/bh/access

Textbooks for the Disabled

August 28, 2009

The Association of American Publishers and the University of Georgia
this week unveiled an electronic database aimed at making it easier for
blind, dyslexic and otherwise impaired college students to get
specialized textbooks in time for classes.

The database, called AccessText, is designed to centralize the process
by which electronic versions of textbooks are requested by colleges and
supplied by publishers. Experts say it will allow disabled students to
get their textbooks more efficiently, help colleges save money and avoid
lawsuits, and protect publishers' copyrights.

For students whose disabilities prevent them from using traditional
texts, the normally straightforward task of acquiring books for their
courses can be tedious and frustrating. Federal law requires that
colleges and universities provide disabled students equal access to
educational materials, but this is often easier said than done. College
officials have to track down and contact the publisher of every textbook
that each of its disabled students buys and request an electronic copy.
If such a copy exists - the likelihood shrinks the older the book and
the smaller the publisher - college officials still have to convert the
file to a format that can be read by whatever reading aid the student
uses. If not, the college has to wait, sometimes weeks, to obtain
permission to scan the book and create its own electronic version.

Once a college has an electronic copy, converting to a readable format
can be another complex process, says Sean Keegan, associate director of
assistive technology at Stanford University. Math and science texts
often arrive as scanned pages, and cannot always be easily read by the
character-recognition software the university uses to turn them into
standard electronic files, Keegan says. "That can take a longer amount
of time to process that material internally and turn it around and give
that to the student efficiently," he says.

Meanwhile, delays in the process can make it impossible for disabled
students to prepare for and participate in classes. "Students need to
have a book in time so they can do the assigned reading and study for
tests and papers," says Gaeir Dietrich, interim director of high-tech
training for the California Community Colleges system. "So if the book
doesn't come until the term has been in session for three or four weeks,
that puts that student very far behind." Some students have sued
colleges over such delays, she says.

AccessText aims to mitigate these woes by streamlining the request and
delivery process, says Ed McCoyd, executive director for accessibility
affairs at AAP.

"There'S a lot of transactional friction taking place currently," says
McCoyd. "What AccessText is trying to do is take some of that out of the
transaction by having parties agree to streamlined rules up front."

Having colleges submit requests using the AccessText portal should
eliminate the need for the publishers to require endless paperwork with
each request to protect its copyrights, McCoyd says. Under the system,
the copyright protection agreements can be handled once, during
registration, and the requester's bona fides can be verified by a
log-in.

Currently, colleges that get tired of waiting for publishers to process
the paperwork and procure an electronic copy of a text sometimes just
scan a text themselves to try to satisfy the needs of disabled students
in a timely fashion, says Dietrich.

AccessText is also set up to eliminate the need for different colleges
to convert the same text to a readable format once it is acquired.
Currently "numerous schools could be doing the exact same thing,
converting the same text," says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for
higher education at the publishers' association. Under the new system,
"if one school has already spent the time and the money to convert a
file to a format, they could advise the AccessText network, which could
then make the info available that it was still available in that format,
and that school could share it with another school" - thereby sparing
those colleges the time and resources it would have used to convert the
file themselves, he says.

Eight major publishing houses paid a total of just under $1 million to
develop the AccessText network and maintain it through its beta phase,
which will end next July. From then on, it will sustain itself by
billing member colleges between $375 and $500 annually, depending on
size.

Dietrich notes that community colleges might not benefit from the
AccessText network as much as other institutions, since "we have a lot
more vocational classes and basic-skills classes, and a lot of those
books don't come through those big publishers, they come through
specialized publishers," she says. "It doesn't solve that part of the
problem for us."

The network includes 92 percent of all college textbook publishers and
is recruiting even more, according to AAP officials.
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