[Missouri-l] Fw: [leadership] New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for Visually Impaired Students Available Faster (fwd)

[Chip Hailey]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Gray" <chris at bayareadigital.us>
To: "ACB Leadership List" <Leadership at acb.org>; "ACB General Discussion 
List" <acb-l at acb.org>; "California Council of the Blind Discussion List" 
<CCB-L at ccbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 2:59 PM
Subject: [leadership] New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for 
Visually Impaired Students Available Faster (fwd)


> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Very interesting article on this below ...
>
> http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-Program-Seeks-to-Make/7742/
>
>
> New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for Visually Impaired
> Students Available Faster
>
> By Marc Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2009
>
> While music-recording companies have been fighting people who illegally
> share songs, book publishers are looking to expand file-sharing for
> college students with print-related disabilities.
>
> AccessText, a new service that rolled out a beta version this week, has
> created an online database that makes it simpler for disability-student
> services at colleges to track down alternative forms of course materials
> from book publishers. When electronic versions don't exist for a
> particular book, the college would get permission to scan the pages so a
> student could either make the font larger, or use other text-to-speech
> or refreshable Braille reading devices.
>
> Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the
> Association of American Publishers, says the new service will maximize
> resources and get students materials faster.
>
> "The publishers have got billions of dollars worth of content. The DSS
> offices are trying to get that out as quickly as possible, generally
> with very, very tight budgets and small staffs, and the students
> obviously need to get it in as timely a fashion as possible, so they're
> not behind," he says.
>
> While the program is in its beta stage until next year, 367 offices are
> testing it free of charge, and eight publishers that are part of the
> association are footing the bill. When AccessText goes live in July
> 2010, members will pay between $375 and $500, on a sliding scale based
> on the institution's size. At that point, Mr. Hildebrand hopes that
> colleges will be able to share materials with other approved
> institutions, with permission, instead of several schools duplicating
> efforts by scanning books that another member may already have.
>
> Dawn V. Adams, digital-media-accessibility specialist at the Alternative
> Media Access Center at the University of Georgia, has been the first
> person to try out AccessText. With the new program, she says she is able
> to get books easier than she has in the past, and the turnaround for
> receiving an answer from a book publisher is as fast as before, if not
> faster.
>
> "It's streamlining the work that I do," says Ms. Adams, who serves more
> than 877 students throughout the University System of Georgia. "All I
> have to do is go to one Web site for five different publishers and click
> a few buttons. It's a really big timesaver."
>
>
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