Ordering School Books?

What should the contract say when your school purchases textbooks, either ink-on-paper ones or digital ones?

NIMAS has suggested this, to ensure that accessible texts will be available for students with "documented disabilities" (a description which varies by US state):
"By agreeing to deliver the materials marked with "NIMAS" on this contract or purchase order, the publisher agrees to prepare and submit, on or before ___/___/_____ a NIMAS fileset to the NIMAC that complies with the terms and procedures set forth by the NIMAC. Should the vendor be a distributor of the materials and not the publisher, the distributor agrees to immediately notify the publisher of its obligation to submit NIMAS filesets of the purchased products to the NIMAC. The files will be used for the production of alternate formats as permitted under the law for students with print disabilities. Note that the delivery of print versions should not be delayed in cases where the NIMAS fileset has yet to be completed, validated and/or cataloged by the NIMAC."

But this is not really good enough. First, the "documented disability" limitation works against both common decency and educational practice (providing students with what they need), but also against the entire idea of Response-to-Intervention, which requires that we test accommodations and remediations before labelling kids.

Today, at the CSUN 2010 Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, Jeff Diedrich of MITS made a better suggestion.

If you buy books for your school your contract should state that the entire contents and formatting of the purchased texts be available by the delivery date in a fully accessible digital version available to every student (I'm paraphrasing his exact wording). And that version will either be (your choice) provided by the publisher or prepared by the school district (the latter option will require early delivery of a copy which can be cut apart and scanned).

Thus, we skip right past all the controversies and ambiguities of US copyright law and the Chaffee Amendment, and move ourselves directly to universal design, where students get to choose their content delivery system. And you do that simply via the power of the consumer.

We don't really want to, another speaker today, re-open the copyright law thing, since, inevitably, that would become all about Disney's 500 year copyright to Snow White and the RIAA's right to sue random people for millions of dollars and the Authors' Guild ability to stop people from reading books. Instead, we simply want to use the powers of the purchase order to create "the change we need."


A few notes are in order: 
(1) Remember, digital does not mean accessible. Many textbook publishers go to great lengths to provide completely useless digital versions, which cannot be read by screen readers, or otherwise be used creatively by students. However, Pearson Publishing is beginning to offer highly accessible html versions, so consider that.
(2) You always want format flexibility. The more digital versions you can easily create, the more accessible your school will be. DAISY versions do a lot, but can be clunky and hard to learn, and not all versions work with all DAISY players. Plain Text (.txt) or .doc (Microsoft Word) versions are easy to use, but often lack the formatting basic to many textbooks. HTML has a lot of advantages, as is shown by those produced by the Accessible Book Collection.
(3) Bookshare is a fabulous resource but books tend to come in just one format. Conversion isn't always easy.
(4) There are good resources at the Accessible Instructional Media page on the MITS-Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports site.
(5) You might also want to take a look at "The Right to Read," so we build understanding that unless access to what is in books is the same for all, we are choosing to leave people behind.

- Ira Socol

Text-To-Speech to Build Literacy from the Start

At ATIA 2009 in Chicago I presented my argument for using Text-To-Speech systems from the start of literacy education.

Text-to-Speech for Beginning Readers -ATIA Chicago 09

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

Sure, the favorite (most tweeted) quote was, "if phonics worked it would be spelled differently," but the focus was on strategies which work - on using Text-To-Speech to help bridge the issues of differential home/parental literacy skills, and using TTS to offer access to content before decoding can take over, on using TTS to improve sight-word recognition and new vocabulary acquisition, and perhaps most importantly, using TTS to prove to kids that there is value in books, that there is value in reading, by giving them a chance to get to what's inside the books.

Because reading should not be a school skill. It should not be a task. Reading is learning to take in information and process it for our own use - something schools rarely show students.

Anyway, thanks to the folks from WYNN who helped out (and gave away a software package as a prize!), and thanks to Karen Janowski for coming to visit!

- Ira Socol

Othering Texts (a brief history)

Liz Kolb asked on Twitter today about how schools choose what to spend their time on... I wish I had time for an original response but I wanted to at least post this, a section of an article I wrote last year (titled "Literacy (as) Tyranny"). It speaks to part of the construction of "worth" we abuse our students with:



In his 1998 book, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gansta-Rap, 1830-1996, John Springhall describes the cycle of destabilizing effects which arrive with each change in media delivery or popular content form. Reviewing the book, Charles Hatfield sums it up, “The advent of new communications media has proved especially threatening to visions of ideal childhood, for children's use of such media tends to be early and formative. Such early exposure challenges the mediation of parents, teachers and other authorities, and often incites adult panic.”



In order for a society to invest in schools, a perceived need must exist. In order for society to invest in a system of social reproduction, a perceived need must exist. In order for a society to make “literacy” a priority, a perceived need must exist.



What is the need which pushes a society to make these decisions?



Is the need transmission of culture? Is the need transmission of a work ethic? Is the need preparation of trained workers? Is the need development of compliant citizens?



Or is the need the development of creativity? Of personal voice? Is the goal to allow for multiple representations? Multiple ideas of knowledge?

“Learning is not to be found on a printout. It's not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books. And from teachers, and the more learned and empathetic the better. And from work, concentrated work. Abigail Adams put it perfectly more than 200 years ago: "Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought with ardor and attended with diligence." Ardor, to my mind, is the key word.”



“Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.”



“Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.”(see article)

-McCullough, D. (2008) The Love of Learning. Commencement Speech at Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts

One of the ways to ask about a society’s perceived purpose of literacy and education is to see which texts are “included” in curricula and which are left out. A look at Puritan New England in the seventeenth century, for example, would find only the Bible and books of Common Prayer “included,” and all other “popular literature” (whether printed or oral) doubted as to its moral value (Wright 1920). A look at late nineteenth century American culture would find the works of Horatio Alger – with their emphasis on moral judgment, hard work, and capitalist success – “included” but other ‘dime novels’ – filled as they were with rebellion, freedom, and independent lives – quite firmly excluded (Springhall, 1998).



In 1960s and 70s America, books that told of rebellion and creativity within the basic shape of American society – from Fitzgerald to Hemingway – were “included.” Those which threatened those boundaries, either in written style or content, whether old or new – whether Dos Passos or Kerouac – were excluded.



This split is also obvious when we see ‘preferred forms.’ Early New England thought songs were slothful, while celebrating the fixed nature of print. Turn of the twentieth century America thought books, especially expensive books, far more worthwhile than vaudeville or early film. Much was made in the last half of the twentieth century of youth wasting their lives on television as book reading declined.



Often, forms of communication perceived as “easier” by the elites are derided. Socrates thought reading far easier than memorizing, and since that time, reading has consistently been seen as “more difficult” (and thus more worthy) than listening or watching. Film classes are considered “easier” than literature classes. Art History as “easier” than literary history. Books with larger words – more “difficult” vocabulary, are considered more valuable than “easier” fare – and surely more valuable than a graphic novel.



The question is – is difficulty for a large part of the population a legitimate measure of worth? Or is it a system of preserving and/or controlling power?



- Ira Socol [copyright 2008 Ira David Socol]



Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gansta-Rap, 1830-1996. St. Martin’s Press. New York.

Hatfield, C. (2002) Book Review. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gansta-Rap, 1830-1996. The Lion and the Unicorn. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Word Accessible: WordTalk and Ghotit

Sure, we can all hate Microsoft. There's so much they do that annoys us. But let's face it - they make the products that make most of our computers go. XP was a great operating system (is still for Netbooks), Vista - for all the complaints - is even better if you turn off "User Account Control" and stop it from indexing everything. I think Windows7 - as bloated as it will be - will be better still.

And Microsoft Office is the standard. Yes, OpenOffice copies it well, but Word, Excel, OneNote - these are fantastic applications - and applications which are incredibly easy to use with all kinds of accessibility applications. And, chances are, your school has already bought and paid for Microsoft Office. It is there, waiting for you to make it better.

And now, we have new ways to make Microsoft Word much more powerful, with two free add-ons - the newest version of WordTalk and the new Ghotit plug-in.

This doesn't mean to forget about the built in supports: You should be teaching your students about options from Equation Editor (math symbols), to altering Grammar Check settings as they need it, to using Auto Correct to simplify text entry (on my computer, typing "msucoe" produces "Michigan State University College of Education" - saving a great deal of time for this one-fingered keyboarder), to altering fonts, font sizes, colors, spacing and whatever else is needed to make the screen comfortable. We need to be offering those options 'every day.'

But these new systems, these can make huge differences for virtually every student.

WordTalk converts Microsoft Word into a text-to-speech system. This supports reading in many ways, and because it uses synchronized word-by-word highlighting, it dramatically builds sight-word recognition. Obviously, content becomes accessible and students become independent - they no longer have to wait for people to read to them. And because WordTalk now converts text to .wav and .mp3 files, text becomes supremely portable - put it on a CD, an iPod, your phone. (see the CALL Centre's guide to creating content accessibility)

But WordTalk also supports writing. When writers hear their words read back to them they recognize problems in ways they simply can not while reading print. They hear misspellings, they hear repeated and missing words. They hear repetitive words. They hear issues with rhythm, even issues with description.

And WordTalk, when combined with AutoCorrect shortcuts, even creates an elementary AAC device. Build key short-cuts for phrases, and WordTalk turns Word into a speech synthesizer.

Ghotit adds another powerful tool - context-based spell checking with definition-support and text-to-speech access. Adding Ghotit to Word changes the spellcheck experience completely. No longer do you have to be "very close" with your initial spelling. You can be way off and, chances are, Ghotit will find the right word. And then Ghotit will give you a list of word choices - with definitions. It will read those choices and definitions to you. And not misspelled words - but misused words as well, it notes words "out of context" (in a different color) and offers the same choices. So it is not just correcting spelling, it is building knowledge of the English language.

When Ghotit is in use, students begin to show more confidence in their writing, they begin to take more chances with an expanded vocabulary, because they know they are less likely to look foolish - to fail in spelling - to use the wrong words.

There is an online version of Ghotit, but with a simple, free sign-up, your school can add Ghotit for Word to every computer

There is a simple fact: Just as there should not be a school (or university) computer anywhere without Firefox with Click-Speak and Accessibar installed, there should not be a Windows/Office equipped school computer without WordTalk and Ghotit installed. These are free solutions which allow schools to meet some of their civil rights obligations under US and EU laws. They are a basic move toward making educational success possible for a wide group of students currently "left behind." And they are a first step toward bringing a school in line with Universal Design.

To not have these software systems available everywhere is nothing less than educational malpractice.

- Ira Socol

Blocking Access from the Top

When you want to understand an educational institution's attitude toward people with disabilities, it is often helpful to start at the top. When you look at the top you can discover the priorities and attitudes which flow throughout the institutional structure.

This isn't to suggest that there may not be great people who are really trying beneath a disinterested or openly hostile point of executive power, nor to suggest that there may not be disinterested people or active resisters beneath a committed and active center of executive power. Those situations surely exist. But the attitudes at the top will usually be a significant way of measuring the potential for progress.

So I learned something important this week when I walked into the suite of Presidential Offices at my university. I was there for "another issue" but the attitudes toward disability immediately became the dominant thing.

"I would like to find out," I asked, "how I could meet with someone from the President's office, regarding 'x' because I have tried what seems like every other route through the university bureaucracy."

"We have a form you can fill out," the receptionist responded, "and someone will review it and get back with you." She reached into her desk and pulled out a clipboard with a paper form on it.

"Is that form available on-line, or in some accessible form?" I asked. "I have trouble writing."

"access to information and communication is a civil right for people with disabilities"

The receptionist could have responded in a number of ways:

She could have said, "I'm sorry, we do not have that yet, but I'll be happy to fill out the form for you."

Or she could have said, "I'm sorry, we do not have that yet, but I'll be happy to help you fill out the form if you would like."

Or she could have said, "May I get your information and have someone get back to you?"

The apology would have been nice. The suggestion that a flaw in the system might be corrected in the future would have been even nicer. But the essential thing which might have been offered, which should have been offered, was a way around the problem.

But what the receptionist said was this: "The president's schedule is prepared weeks in advance, it wouldn't make any sense to have it online."

A non-answer combined with a refusal to help or even concede that this was anything more than "my problem."

"according to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), "there is an affirmative duty to develop a comprehensive policy in advance of any request for auxiliary aids or services" (Waddell, pars. 3-5)."

I took the form, scribbled my information as best as I could while muttering about "Section 504" and "federal law." I could tell the receptionist was annoyed. I typed her name onto the memo function on my mobile before leaving the office. I like to remember who I've been talking to.

Small thing? Yes.

Deeply revealing? Of course.

If we notice that the university president's office does not even have the legal and social skills training to deal with a very simple expression of disability concerns it becomes clear why the university's library is inaccessible and why accessibility software is not on university computers and why university faculty has no idea what makes a PDF accessible and why the office for disability services is widely reviled by the students who use it. It even explains why not even the educational program aimed at preparing teachers to work with students with special educational struggles to 'get it.'

I left the office and considered opening up my laptop in the corridor, connecting to the nearest Wi-Fi router, and filing an OCR complaint right from the President's IP address. But I decided to wait. The university president has a PhD in education after all, perhaps, if her staff forwards my concerns, she can learn from this "teachable moment."

And what did I learn? Now I understand much more clearly the lack of concern, the lack of urgency, throughout the university regarding either complying with the law or simply "doing the right thing." When leadership doesn't care, it is difficult to expect those below to be much better.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

An inability to understand

powered by ODEO
interview with Melinda Pongrey of LDLive - 16 May 2008

[warning, the following might be less than fully coherently written]

When I present I sometimes tell the story of the star.

A long time ago I met with a special education teacher about a student we were providing technology for. As we were talking I was doodling, and I drew a star.

"If he saw that," the teacher asked, pointing to the star, "could he copy it?" I said that I was sure he could, in fact, that given his art skills, he could copy almost any picture. "Then why," she asked, leaning over, writing the word "star" in lower case print letters, "if I write this, he can't type it for me."

And in that moment I discovered something. I discovered why "this" - with "this" being special education or education itself - so rarely "works." It rarely works, I realized, because the two 'sides' - teacher and student - often have such radically different views of the universe that communication becomes impossible. In the decade since this revelation has been reinforced a thousand times.

"Well," I said to the teacher, "first, I don't think he sees words as individual letters, just as pictographs. Little images which might mean something. So he doesn't separate that out automatically into letters, and the keyboard doesn't have a "star" key." She looked at me puzzled, and I knew why. Teachers spent so much time being beaten with reading strategies that they have forgotten the obvious. Almost none of us "read letters." we read "word shapes" - pictographs - logograms - sinographs - whatever - every bit as much in alphabetic languages as in a language like Chinese. But we lie to students about it every day.

This is why you can read those emails you get where the interior letters of the words are all scrambled, but you can still read all the words because nobody actually reads using phonics or by sounding things out, you read by knowing - the better a reader you are the more automatic this is - that this picture - teacher (you'd recognize it even if looked like "taecher") - means something different than this picture - student. Just as you do not sound out the letters when you see a McDonald's or a BP sign. But, as I just said, we lie to students about this every day. We lie to them so much we actually convince ourselves of what we are saying.

So, no "star" key on the computer, but I had to point something else out. "Even if he could break that picture apart into letters," I told the teacher, "those letters aren't on the keyboard - well, only one of them is." She looked at me like I was crazy. I still do this, I ask teachers all the time, "What letters aren't on the keyboard?" On a very good day one out of thirty will figure it out.

I had to pick up a keyboard to demonstrate. "That 's" is there," I said, "but I don't see anything like the t, a, or r. And he doesn't know that those lower case letters match up."

That's something else we lie to students about. We tell them that there are 26 letters in the alphabet. Just about every struggling students know what a massive lie that is. There are lots of different symbols which represent the same thing and we have to memorize all these pictures - surely if we're trying to "sound things out." And that can be very difficult, because alphabetic language is a code system, just as musical notation and Morse Code are. The only difference is that those follow some logical structure, and the alphabet, especially as used in English, is just random nonsense with various sounds assigned randomly to various letters, depending on the word. As I sometimes say, it is as if the numeral "1" meant "one" if presented by itself, but meant "thirty-four" if it followed a "3" or "six" if it came before a "5."

Which is why most of us, almost every one of us, reads by word shape, or what educators call "sight word recognition."

But teachers live in a world constructed one way. A world in which phonics matters (if phonics worked in English, it would obviously be spelled differently), in which the alphabet contains 26 symbols, in which reading means decoding a series of letters printed in ink on paper, in which drawing a picture of a star is a less valid method of saying "star" than typing the word "star" on a keyboard.

And students live in a world constructed entirely differently. A world in which, though we say they can't read, they have no problem distinguishing McDonald's from Burger King simply by the sign. A world in which, outside of the classroom, they seem quite capable of communicating. A world in which they can gather a ton of information and knowledge every day without ever looking at letters in ink on paper. A world in which - to be quite honest - they are far better equipped to do everything from learn how their mobile works to following Ikea assembly instructions than most of their teachers are.

So teachers look at students and see an inability to succeed in things that have always - obviously - been important, even essential. And students look at teachers and see people lying - and not just lying - lying about things which seem obviously irrelevant.

This starts at the beginning of school with the alphabet. Because the kids know that they really don't need to sound out letters to recognize words - they've already been recognizing words for years. And it ends at university where students get knocked for "bad" citations even though every student knows that the only valuable citation is the hyperlink to where the source material lies.

To illustrate: On my last post an anonymous commenter said, "The idea of an illiterate pilot or paramedic is absolutely frightening. How, for example, can an illiterate person give the right dosage of the right medicine in an injection ("Quick, inject 30 ccs of morphine!" "Uhhhh....which one of these is morphine and how can I tell what 30 ccs is?")."

I have no way of knowing, of course, but this sure sounds like "an educator." An educator who lives in that bizarre self-constructed world of academics. Few otherwise might make the kinds of mistakes he or she makes.

Having worked, once upon a time, in emergency medicine, I can tell you that the last thing you want a paramedic doing is stopping to read the vial - perhaps sounding "mmmm-or-puh-hee-n" out phonetically. What you want is someone who knows what that vial looks like and feels like, and where it is, and can grab it every single time in, just as an example, a barely lighted corridor or a dark street corner with their eyes fixed on the patient. You even want someone who can eyeball 30 cc rather than taking the time to read the gradations. And you want the information flowing among the professionals in the clearest, easiest to understand communications system - which is whatever communications system the receiver prefers. Speak it to me, text it to him.

Mr. or Ms. Anonymous (or who knows? maybe Dr. Anonymous) actually thinks that we all operate daily in "book reading" form. But few of us do. We gather information multiple ways, we create meaning out of many things. We remember in many ways. And if people were really helping to help us learn, they would help us to find the paths we need to walk to know what we need to know.

But instead schools lie about how people learn and communicate, or, as the Anonymous commenter does (see, again, the post below), we insult. We say, "he's illiterate" and we limit his or her possibilities. We make things hard when we could be making them - if not easy - much easier. But we don't make the efforts because we're really, really bad at understanding each other. Instead, we're constantly trying to force our students to do it our way.

Could we do it other ways? Consider just a couple of ways of seeing things from the struggling end-users point of view:

Last week a student told me that when he is at home on line he copies the text of websites, pastes it into Word, and makes the letters big enough so that there are only a few words on a line. "then I don't get lost," he told me. "Wow," I said, "did they teach you that in school?" "No," he told me. "Do they let you do that in class?" I asked. "No," he said, "we don't use computers in class."

"I recognize a lot more words on paper since I've been using WYNN," a college student told me recently, echoing something I hear a great deal. "It really helps because I used to just freeze when I got to new words, but now I hear them and see them and it kind of goes all together."

"I made the keyboard labels with both upper and lower case letters on them," a teacher told me last year, "the kids love them. It has made a big difference."

"He's just been dictating to that computer for a week now," another teacher said about a fourth grader we'd armed with speech recognition. "He used to just sit there and throw things at the other kids, now he's completely engaged."

"Thanks for the Reading Pen," a nurse emailed me. "I don't run across stuff I struggle with often, but knowing that I can pull this out of my pocket and make sure I'm right makes a giant difference."

"You type faster on your phone," a friend told me. "Yeah," I said, "I love the word prediction, I don't worry about spelling." "Someone needs to develop a free iTap system for regular computers," he said.

"Thanks for turning me onto Jott," a social worker told me, "No one could ever read my handwriting before and so I'd have to come back from these field visits and type everything up. Now I just drive speaking into my headset, and I send the notes right to the secretary."

"I can't believe how much I've come to depend on audiobooks," a friend says, "My reading was getting limited because my eyes hurt at the end of the day. I never thought I'd be the one sitting with an iPod all evening, but that's what I do now."

Next time, when faced with a student who is struggling to do it "your way," think about this. Is "your way" really the only way? Can this student even see "your way"? Or is there a different way that's needed because the world looks different from "over there"?

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Accessible Materials

"...another part of our strategy is to push for an accessibility policy from the university. That we would commit to ensuring that all 'internal' material (handouts, course material, reports, student publications etc etc) would be available in accessible format simultaneously. As one of my colleagues in Trinity College Dublin said recently, why can't this stuff, which is already on someone's hard drive, be made available?" - Enda Guinan, NUI Maynooth.

Last fall a faculty member sent me a PDF document to read. Perhaps you have seen documents like this. It was an "image only" scan of a copy of a copy of a copy of an article that had been written on by a note-taking reader at some point long ago. I opened it up in Acrobat Reader. Looked under the "Document" menu. Went to "Accessibility Quick Check." Noticed that this "Document contains only images." Cursed. Opened WYNN, tried scanning the document in through the Freedom Import Printer - the best tool I know of for forcing this kind of conversion, and got back a text file which looked like this:

fñJr?Íd *fP?rtmentali2f tí°« of knowledge components. Components of knowledge that are m fact interdependent are treated as being separable from each other. Learners develop mistaken SS m the

m^tTi Í rmP°neu * RdatedIy’Where kn0Wiedge «mP«««s do Lction md^endentt it un¡£2 h% C3Se that COnVCying relatIOI5shiPs ^«n then- conceptual structures woufd ad undemanding; these connections are not drawn, When components are interrelated, there » a £Se*y to

it°ne imkageriSCheme’there^ ^^representing the richness of interconnection m the iSnTaS narrow, doctrinaire viewpoints (see the problem of single representations).

¿¿SiUbSS^1011 °/^0Wí?ge- T*ÍSP”*»**** encoded u”d« a scheme dete external authority («*, a textbook) or a scheme which facilitates delivery and use. Knowledge is ’’ the learner The preemptive encoding is passively received by the learner, and^fuTbtnefitf

In one of my "angry moods," I sent the document back to the faculty member and said, "here's what the file you sent looks like to me, can we do something about this?"

Thankfully, this prof was one of the good guys. He was stunned (and I think a bit embarrassed). He asked me lots of questions. I think 30 emails went back and forth. I'm pretty sure that all of his class materials are accessible these days.

But that is not always the reaction.

Listen - given a reasonably accessible document text becomes accessible freely for most students who need different formats, and quickly available for the others. Give me a basic document in Microsoft Word and - at zero cost - I can have it read to you by Natural Reader (free) or you can paste it into a Google Doc (free) and read it with Click-Speak (free) or FireVox (free), or I can simply add WordTalk (free) into Word and you can read it right there. Or you can convert it into a Microsoft Reader (free) E-book and give it to the student in a form that combines text-to-speech with each-word-as-it-is-read-highlighting, with notetaking (or test answer), and bookmarking capabilities. I can use NaturalReader to make it an mp3 or I can go to SpokenText and do the same. And if I need at 'not-free' level of support, I can easily grab it and paste it into WYNN, or use it with Read-and-Write, or convert it to Braille.

If I have an accessible Acrobat Document I can simply ask the (free) Read-Aloud feature in Adobe Reader 8.x to read it out loud. And with the actual Acrobat Pro software I can take it apart into text, or, as I've suggested above, I can scan it "internally" using the import printers in full literacy-support packages or using an OCR program such as OmniPage (a fine version of which comes free with most Canon Scanners, including the very inexpensive "backpackable" LiDE scanners which simply run off the USB power from your laptop).

But those are not the ways people in education seem to want to deliver materials.

A couple of weeks ago I picked on US textbook publisher W.W. Norton for going out of their way to make even their digital textbooks worthless to those who struggle with print. Norton seems to have worked overtime to block accessibility - and let us be clear, that is what they did. They began with a perfectly acceptable text-file, and probably spent a year guaranteeing that many students could not use it.

Not everyone goes at it with the same intent, but by this point in 2008, I no longer care about supposed intent. By this point everyone in education should know that materials need to be accessible - if they don't, they have chosen to remain ignorant. And by this point every educational organization should both know how to create, and be committed to creating, fully accessible materials - if they don't they are - to quote Karen Janowski on the wider topic of Universal Design - guilty of educational malpractice.

So, everything should be accessible, as we said at the start. Is there a model for doing this?

The first step seems obvious. You begin with everything created or purchased starting today. Every teacher, professor, administrator, librarian, staff member, and supplier of academic materials to the district must know how to make every document they make accessible and must have a system to check that with when they are not sure. Text documents, books, PowerPoint Presentations (be sure to have PowerTalk on hand), PDFs, websites, they all have to either be created fully accessible or have fully accessible alternatives which arrive simultaneously. (Note: this includes "effective" informational alt. tags on every image in every document, PDF, and website - if you are not doing that, you have not even started, so a great place to start analysing your accessibility capacity is to start surveying your faculty and staff, asking, do you alt. tag. every image?) For website access - check out these posts from jamessocol.com

What about those books? First, every textbook purchased must come with a fully accessible digital version usable in a variety of alternate formats. If the publisher will not give you this, do not buy the book. Second, for all other books, ask for a digital format right when you buy it (most likely if you are buying quantities or ordering quantities for your university bookstore), but if there is not a digital version - make one before the first book is sold, or handed to a student, or stuck on a library shelf. Scan it with an OCR system, and store that file so students who need it can get it quickly and easily.

Those should be absolute rules from today on, but what about all the old stuff? (because your school, university, government has chosen to ignore this issue for the past decade)
At the California State University system (the world's largest university1), the Accessible Technology Initiative is now entering its third year. I'm not holding Cal State up as "the best people around." Don't get me wrong. CSU is thinking about these things ahead of most universities only because they were successfully sued repeatedly by their own students for violating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 - which requires equal access to "information and communication" at any school or university in the United States which receives even one dollar (that's € 0.64 or £ 0.51 today) of federal funds (this includes federal or federally-guaranteed grants or loans to students).

Let me quote from their statements:

"Instructional Materials (IM) are considered to be forms of communication and must therefore be delivered in a manner that is equally effective for persons with disabilities. Communication is considered to be equally effective when it is:

• comparable in quality to those received by students without disabilities
• comparable in timeliness of delivery and availability
• provided in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and the abilities of the person receiving the material"

then they created a set of parameters:

"Each campus is directed to adopt and submit an Instructional Materials Accessibility Plan (IMAP) no later than June 15, 2007. The plan should address, at a minimum, the specific actions to be taken by the campus for the following areas:

• Timely adoption of textbooks by faculty
• Ensuring textbook selection/ordering for courses with late-hired faculty
• Early identification of students with disabilities who require modified instructional materials
• Use of the campus learning management system both for delivering technology-enabled course content, and for posting syllabi and instructional materials in both traditional and hybrid courses
• Incorporation of accessible ... procurement requirements when purchasing instructional materials (e.g. transcripts for audio, captions for videos)
• Alignment of academic technology resources to assist faculty in the creation of technology-enabled courses
• Communication and training processes to educate students, staff, and faculty about the campus IMAP (Instructional Materials Accessibility Plan)
  
• Identification of specific roles and responsibilities for responsible parties
• Identification of an evaluation process (including milestones and timelines) to measure the effectiveness of the plan"

and then they created a timeline, including very specific targets:

"Fall Term 2008: New courses and new course content, including instructional materials and instructional websites, will be designed and authored in a manner that incorporates accessibility. If incorporating accessibility is not possible or would constitute an undue burden, then a plan to provide an equally effective alternate form of access must be developed, documented, and communicated. Existing course content will be made accessible at the point of course redesign or when a student with a disability enrolls in the course.

"Fall Term 2012: Instructional materials and instructional websites for all course offerings will be accessible. Once again, undue burden plan requirements (as described above) apply."

No, you can't accomplish this overnight, but you can develop strategies. What if books were scanned with OCR systems as they were returned to the library. Can't do them all? Just do 10% of those returned each day, or 1%, or 0.001%, or just a single book everyday. It won't be quick, but combined with the new book policy, you'll be moving forward, not backward. (and remember, you don't have to do the million or so books already on Project Gutenberg, Gutenberg Australia, UVA, Fordham, etc., as long as you know where these are and how to quickly direct students to them). What if every department was responsible for converting any non-accessible PDFs to accessibility each semester before they could be used in coursework? Slowly, you'd be cutting through your massive backlog.

You can't really claim to be educating all of your students if academic (and school life) materials are not all accessible. So write your plan down, and get yourself started.

- Ira Socol

1 - and it helps, that the word "accessible" - with its many meanings, appears right up-front on the Cal State system's web home page - "The CSU is a leader in high-quality, accessible, student-focused higher education. With 23 campuses, almost 450,000 students, and 46,000 faculty and staff, we are the largest, the most diverse, and one of the most affordable university systems in the country."

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