Good News / Bad News

There's been a couple of developments I've been tracking in the alternate format text world that bear sharing today.

The Good News

O'Reilly Books, prolific and well-respected publisher of tech books often used for computer science courses, has for some time been providing all of their texts to Bookshare to create accessible versions. Today, O'Reilly announced that they will add text DAISY formats of their books to their lineup of formating options. O'Reilly joins startup publisher FlatWorld Knowledge in the small cadre of publishers who offer books in formats that anyone, regardless of disability, can purchase in the same way, at the same time, and at the same (or lower!) price. Kudos, O'Reilly. We hope the big publishers learn from your example!

The Not-Quite-As-Good News, But Still Better Than It Was Before

The Blind Access Journal has thoroughly reviewed the Kindle 3's new accessibility features. If this is of interest to you, I highly recommend reading Larry's review. There's definitely both good news and bad news there. Bottom line - Kindle still has a way to go to get to equal access for their blind customers.

EBSCO Gets Built-In Reader (video post)

Some exciting news on the library front. EBSCO, the company that supplies the article database most commonly used in the SOU Hannon Library, has decided to partner with NextUp. This is good news for students who can benefit from hearing as well as seeing print, as it means you can have articles read aloud to you from wherever you access the EBSCO database. Details are available from EBSCO's press release.

I wanted to see how it worked, though, so here's what I found. Video seemed the best way to capture the experiment. (It does work in both Mac and PC environments, by the way.)

Exciting Development for Notetaking: Livescribe Pulse pens available

I'm always on the lookout for new and better ways to remove barriers. You may remember I posted (read, gushed) before about the Livescribe Pulse pen. We've run a pilot program with some students who replaced the traditional notetaking accommodation with the Pulse pen.

They loved it. If it works, I reasoned, we should try it on a larger scale! So that's what we're doing. We now have 25 Livescribe Pulse pens in inventory to loan to students who would otherwise be receiving notetaking accommodations. Some use it as a simple index to notes, some will use it in conjunction with PowerPoint slides from class... but there are other uses, as well. Rather than writing about it, though, I think I'll just show you!

Pencast description of Pulse pens for notetaking at SOU

Livescribe notetaking accommodations SOU
brought to you by Livescribe

Audio study guide example (from Livescribe)

Creating audio flash cards (from Livescribe)

Just as in everything else, one size does not fit all... the Pulse pen is not right for everyone. Students who are Deaf, have significant vision loss or mobility impairments may not benefit from using it. If you're uncomfortable with technology and that would present an additional barrier for you, this may not be the best choice. However, for some students this is going to be a huge barrier-buster.

Questions? Comments? Shout 'em out in the comments space!

Never Wonder How to Use AIMS Again: Tutorials

The tutorials are up! The tutorials are up!

If you've wondered how to use AIMS, then wonder no longer. We've got video tutorials to make life easier for you. These tutorials cover everything from logging in for the first time to changing your accommodation requests to scheduling testing. Each is a step-by-step, narrated, and captioned screencast. Watch for them to be embedded in AIMS in the not-too-distant future, giving you a quick reference exactly when and where you need it! Here's a sample of what you'll find:


Other video tutorials, including how to use a number of assistive technology tools and info for faculty, are in the works.

One for my noob friends

Students, unless you want the skinny behind how alternate format text production actually works, y'alls can just skip this one. This post is in answer to a question I got from a friend at another university; she's just jumping in to this whole world of alt text production and needed a bit of an orientation. Not being one to waste a good long email, I've published it here for others. I had a ton of help from the disability services community when I was getting started in this stuff, so I look at questions like this (and I do get them more often than you'd think!) as a way of paying it forward.

My friend is looking for resources outside of her own campus, as right now she doesn't have the ability to establish her own production center. Her question was specifically about audio formats. These conditions influence the information I've put together here.

Eligibility & Copyright

For many of the sources I'm going to mention, there's an eligibility determination that needs to be made by your disability office and communicated to the source. The four criteria that are almost universally applied are:

1. Student has documented print disability. Some sources will restrict to vision impairment, learning disability, or physical disability.
   
2. Student has registered for class, and class requires the book requested. (In the case of graduate school, can potentially include every book in the known universe!)
3. Student, or someone on behalf of the student, has purchased a copy of the book. (Can be used, though the publishers won't tell you that.) Does not apply with RFB&D or Bookshare.
4. Student needs to sign usage agreement that informs them of legal issues related to copyright. Some sources will have their own. I use our own as well: SOU's usage agreement.

Formats

Audio is actually a category rather than a single thing. There are several ways to provide it, and I use a combination of them depending on the needs of the student and the availability of different formats.

• DAISY: The gold standard. DAISY files are actually generally a combination of xml (html with a specialized markup) and mp3 files. Audio-only DAISY (like RFB&D produces) is like an mp3 with navigation. Text-based DAISY (like Bookshare produces) uses text-to-speech from the computer and has on-screen text to follow along with. Both "flavors" have amazing navigation: you can go to a specific chapter, page, or heading; speed it up or slow it down; bookmark; skip.
• MP3: Generally will be text-to-speech synthesized by a computer, unless you're purchasing an audiobook (which is a performance rather than just audio access) from iTunes, Audible, or one of the other audiobook vendors. This is the one students are most comfortable with because it's familiar, though it's actually the least helpful in terms of accommodation because it's not very navigable or manipulable.
• Electronic text with text-to-speech: There are a huge number of text-to-speech applications out there that can read most electronic documents. For home use, I generally point my students to free and inexpensive options, though we also discuss some of the more fully-featured options as well. Many schools use this as the way they provide alternate format text because it's the most flexible for the student, costs less than DAISY to produce, and is far more manipulable than mp3 files.

E-textbooks

Be careful.Many of the e-textbook formats out there use digital rights management or formatting in ways that make the textbook completely inaccessible for students who use assistive technology (like text-to-speech software) to read. FlatWorld Knowledge does have accessible books: their online reading option is accessible with assistive technology and they offer audio as an option for all of their books. In addition, they're partnering with Bookshare, so Bookshare should have the FlatWorld catalog available this fall.

Bottom line: ask about the accessibility of e-texts before purchase. By "accessibility", I mean "access for people who use assistive technology to read", not "can students get to it on the web." Even if the answer is no, you at least know where you stand and your students won't receive an ugly surprise. Plus, the more customers who ask, the more the textbook industry realizes that this is an issue an the more likely they are to do something about it.

Sources

• RFB&D: Recordings for the Blind & Dyslexic has been around a long time, and they are very good at what they do. There are free individual memberships for postsecondary students. Specific books can be requested for production, but these require long lead times. Formats provided: audio-only DAISY in downloadable or CD versions, which require specialized software or hardware to play; WMA files for Windows Media Player and some mp3 player devices. Human voice readings (an essential if using Shakespeare, Beowulf, and the like). Membership required; disability must be certified by clinician or disability office at university.
• Bookshare.org: Newer on the block, Bookshare has a growing library. They also have free individual memberships for postsecondary students. Specific books can be requested for production, but require long lead times.Formats provided: plain text (for public domain books), full text DAISY files, and brf (Braille ready format - can be embossed directly to Braille or read on a refreshable Braille device). Bookshare provides free software to read DAISY files. Membership required; disability must be certified by clinician or disability office at university.
• National Library Service: Run by the Library of Congress and most state libraries, the NLS makes books available to eligible patrons. Their registration process is entirely individual, so I haven't worked with them other than to refer students to them. Formats available: Braille, DAISY.
• AccessText Network: This is a cooperative group of the largest publishers to make requesting electronic copies of textbooks for conversion to accessible formats faster and easier for disability offices. No direct student connection. However, if you're going to outsource production, requesting files from AccessText will make the production faster, cheaper, and more accurate than scanning files. The membership agreement is full of legalese - may want to run it through legal counsel. Someone from your institution will need to go through the training, etc. to start using it. It's free right now, but they're going to start charging $500 a year this summer. Given the time and resource savings over scanning, it's worth it.
• Alternate Text Production Center: This is the production center for the California Community Colleges. They will produce books in Braille or e-text for other schools using a fee-for-service model.
• Badger Accessibility Services: Fee-for-service based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They're fast and extremely accurate.
  
• Digilife Media: Conversion service with a pretty good reputation.
  
• Read How You Want: Bookstore for Braille and DAISY titles. Catalog is fairly small.
• Librivox: Human-read audio versions of books in the public domain. They have fantastic readers, and it's all free.
• OpenLibrary: Has a huge number of DAISY books and is adding them all the time.
• The standard audiobook places: iTunes, Audible.com, Audiobooks.com, etc.

Text to Speech Applications

I'm actually going to point you back to other posts in my blog for this category. There's a number of posts there that can be helpful. Basically, text to speech applications read text from the screen through a computer synthesized voice. The built-in voices in the Windows operating system are pretty awful (though Anna, which comes with Windows 7, is a definite step up), but there are many out there for purchase that work much much better.

Wow, you made it to the end! Hope this is helpful.

Using Skim to Read PDFs Aloud on Your Mac

This is one of those situations where I went looking for directions to a specific task in order to give them to a student...and couldn't find them. Yet, this is a function I use fairly regularly and refer students to, so, gosh, wouldn't it be helpful to have those instructions available?

Hence, this post.

Skim is a fabulous free program for the Mac. All of the things that I would want to do with a printed PDF I can do with Skim (except perhaps wadding up the file and shooting wastepaper baskets with it). I can highlight, circle, underline, write notes, and put stickies on the page. What's even better, though, I can also search those notes and stickies, or the whole document, quickly and easily. Further, using the Mac's built-in capability to turn text into speech, I can have the document read aloud to me. That read-aloud feature is also built into Acrobat Reader, but using Skim gives me all those annotation tools plus the read-aloud. Here's how.

The Setup

Let's get your Mac ready to read whatever you ask it to.

1. Go to System Preferences
2. Click on Universal Access
3. Check the "Enable access for assistive devices" box in the Seeing tab
4. Go back to System Preferences (Show All)
5. Click on Speech
6. Choose a System Voice that doesn't irritate you. Alex (available with OS 10.5 and later) is dandy. For older systems, Victoria or Vicki are usually good choices. Some of the others will likely drive you 'round the bend. Test them by clicking Play
   
7. Choose a speed that's comfortable by adjusting the Speaking Rate slider about some and then clicking Play
8. Create a shortcut key to read - this will make the reading process much much faster later on. Do this by checking the "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" box and pressing the key (or key combination) you want to use to start reading aloud. I use CTRL+R. Make sure you select something that isn't used for another reason, then click OK
9. Close System Preferences

Using Speech in Skim

There are two ways to read: starting from the beginning and reading straight through, or reading just specifically selected text.
To read straight through:

1. Open Skim, then open the document you want to read (make sure it's a PDF)
   
2. In the Edit menu, select Speech, then Start Speaking
3. To stop, go to the Edit menu, select Speech, then Stop Speaking

Sometimes, though, you'll want to pick up on page 2, or you only really want to read one section aloud. Here's how to do that:

1. Highlight the text you want to read aloud
2. Press the key combination you set up earlier (told you it would come in handy!)
3. To stop, press the key combination again
   

The Catch

Unfortunately, the read-aloud function will only work in PDFs that are text-based rather than image-based. If you can't highlight and select text, you won't be able to read it aloud. You also won't be able to highlight it, but you can use the other annotation tools in Skim. The good news? If you are an SOU student receiving alternate format text (or are eligible to) from us, I can absolutely convert these image-based PDFs for you. Just email them to me and I'll send you back text-based PDFs.

Have you found other great text-to-speech options on the Mac? Let me know about them in the comments!

Tips & Tricks in Using a Kindle for Academic Reading

With the dawn of the iPad on the scene, some people are wondering why they'd bother with a Kindle. After all, the Kindle can't play games or surf the web (ok, it can, but it's k.l.u.n.k.y.)--or at least, not yet it can't. I've posted before about Kindle accessibility and the advantages and disadvantages of a Kindle for students with disabilities. There have been several pilot programs with the Kindle for college-level reading and they have started posting their results. Examples include Reed College and Princeton University. For the sake of argument, here, let's just assume you have a Kindle, and talk about doing academic reading on one of these bad boys.

Locating Info Within the Book

I'm a very visual person. I use highlighting and margin notes in my books now in order to do one thing: remember where on the page to locate information I may want to use again. Often, I highlight quotes I may want to use in a paper, or I will write a phrase that summarizes a couple of paragraphs and include arrows or brackets. When I go back to what I was reading in order to use it, I use these visual cues to help me locate information. With a physical book, I can flip through the pages and locate what I want. Flipping through the pages is a no-can-do on the Kindle. You'll have to approach it a little differently.

While you're reading:

• Make generous use of Kindle's highlighting feature. Conventional wisdom says to highlight between 10-15% of the material in a physical book. Because you are going to use these highlights differently, shoot for 20% or so. Err on the side of highlighting more than you think you'll need.
  
• Keep the highlights relatively short. The bigger your preferred font size, the shorter you should make your highlights. The reason: when you view My Notes & Marks, where the Kindle stores your highlights, it will display between two (big font size) and size (small font size) lines of highlight. If you are trying to locate something and it's below that cutoff line, you won't see it when you're scrolling through the Notes & Marks.
• Type your notes as tags, not conventional notes. Typing on the Kindle is a bit of a, well, pain in the gluteus. The less you have to do, the easier it will be. Think of your notes as labels (tags) that will help you get back to related content. You can put multiple tags in a note, if you want. I also don't worry about capitalization or punctuation in the notes as it just slows the note entry process further. A bonus of this practice is that it encourages you to make concise (1 word!) summaries of the material you're reading, which will help your retention and comprehension. (For example, the tags I'd create for this paragraph are: tag, label, category, summary, notes, suggestions. Yours might be different from mine!)

Finding the information again:

• Search! The search feature in the Kindle is pretty darn handy. If you remember a key word or phrase (the shorter the better, by the way) that can help you locate a passage again, search for it. You can also search just your tags (notes) by typing in the search word, then moving the 5-way button to the right until it highlights 'notes'.
• View your marks. In the Menu, select "View My Notes & Marks" (one book) or in the Home screen select "My Clippings" (all your books). Because, again, I'm recommending a generous use of highlighting, there will be several pages of marks. While this is a little time-consuming to flip through, it is significantly faster than trying to remember where you saw that one thing and going through page turn after page turn in the full book. In one book I was using for my last paper, I had 72 pages of notes and marks. However, I was always able to find what I was looking for...which is kinda the point, right?
  

Citations

There's just not a lot of agreeement out there on how to cite Kindle books. The lack of real page numbers makes specific references just a bit wonky. However, the folks at the APA were kind enough to actually address citing the Kindle. For other style formats (MLA, Chicago, etc.), the consensus seems to be to consider it an online/electronic, unpaginated source. Remember, cite the version you read. If you read the Kindle, cite it. If you read the physical book, cite that. If you read it on Google Books, cite that.

Those Darn PDFs

One of the best - and worst - features of the Kindle is its ability to read PDFs. Yes, you can read PDFs natively on the Kindle with no conversion process by either sending them through Amazon's service (cheap) or connecting your Kindle to your computer with the USB cord and dragging the PDFs to the Documents folder on your Kindle (free). However, you can't annotate, change sizes, have the Kindle read it aloud, or any of the other features that make the Kindle such a good reader. I'm going to let you in on a secret that will make this easier... shhh, lean in a little closer....

Go download Calibre.

Free. Open source. End of problem. Wish I'd discovered this three terms ago when I first got my Kindle.

New News - AT and Our Landmark Summer Program

Just a quick note this time.

SOU and Landmark College are partnering to offer a high school summer program for students with learning challenges. There's a great article about it (especially the assistive technology aspects!) in today's Ashland Tidings.

To find out more about the program, check out Landmark's site.

See, told you it would be quick.

Alternate format text... independently

This is another colleague-question inspired post. She was looking for resources that would help her relative (who has learning disabilities) through law school. I figured... hey, what a good opportunity for a blog post!

Text to speech programs

There are a number of text-to-speech programs out there that will, well, turn text into computerized speech. I've covered a number of these in some of my blog posts (tools for Mac users, another one for Mac, an older one for PC tools). Here's a more up-to-date list of my favorite text-to-speech tools and what the advantages and disadvantages are of each of them.

• Read Please: Free. Microsoft voices; customizable font & background color; copy/paste reading; reads email emoticons, adjustable voice speed. (There is also a not-free version that includes better voices and more options.)
• Advantages: Free! Easy to use. Several nice options.
• Disadvantages: Microsoft voices awful. Copy/paste method of reading is cumbersome to say the least.
• Natural Reader: Free. Can read Word, email, even accessible PDF files, Select text and press a key - not copy/paste; voice speed adjustable; change font sizing, zoom; uses Microsoft voices
• Advantages: Free! Can be used within Word or other applications
• Disadvantages: Microsoft voices awful. Have had reports from students about issues with crashing/locking up
• GhostReader (Mac): Inexpensive (trial free, full version $39.95). Great Cepstral voices; comes in multi-lingual formats; convert text to iTunes tracks easily, includes bookmark capability in exported iTunes tracks; reads accessible PDF files; has word-by-word tracking when reading on screen.

Creating text from physical books

"But..." (I hear you saying) "...I have actual books I have to read. How do I get them on my computer?" There are a couple of options: finding books that are already in an accessible format, or creating that format yourself. Here's how to convert physical books into documents you can use a text-to-speech program to read.

1. Scan the book. If you only need a few pages, a flatbed scanner will be fine. Otherwise, you'll want to cut off the binding (a copy shop usually as a guillotine that can do this for you) and then use an automatic document feeder on a scanner.
2. Use optical character recognition software (OCR) to convert the scan (pictures of pages) into actual text. Omnipage and Abbyy FineReader are the market leaders. I prefer Omnipage because it tends to recognize unknown images as text, where Abbyy tends to recognize unknown images as graphics. Omni also handles Greek symbols quite well. Abbyy is a bit easier to learn. Both are excellent products.
3. Open the .doc file you've created in step 2 and do a little clean-up. Remove optional hyphens (they'll mess up the reading) by doing a find-and-replace for ^- (replace with nothing). Ensure margins are consistent and reasonable throughout the document. Spell-check.
4. Read, using your favorite text-to-speech program above

Another option is to use Kurzweil to scan, convert, and read the text. It's not cheap ($395 for read-only, $1095 for black-and-white conversion version, $1495 for color conversion version), but Kurzweil is the Cadillac option. It's easy, it's smooth, it has all the bells and whistles for conversion, reading, and writing that you might need. There's versions for both Mac and PC, and a trial version is available.

Some serious words about copyright when creating alternate formats

Remember, folks, that this process is for your personal/educational use only. Don't distribute what you've created to anyone - that would be a violation of copyright law - and for for the love of Pete don't sell the alternate format. What we're talking about here is access... since traditional paper books (and many e-books, for that matter) are not accessible for people with certain disabilities, this process is designed to make them accessible so you can read the great stuff the author wrote. That's it.

Searching for already-available alternate format text

There are several places to get accessible formats of text. I've written pretty extensive blog posts already on Recordings for the Blind & Dyslexic and Bookshare.org, both of which have free memberships for students. They create beautifully accessible audio versions of texts of all kinds. For other sources of text that can be used with text-to-speech, you might also want to check out our Alt Format Resources webpage.

Tools I'm Using 2.0

Back in May and June of last year, I wrote a series of posts on the organization, writing, and research tools I'm using for my doctoral work. I've since winnowed that list down a bit and revised some of my processes. Since it's the time of the term when students are finishing up finals and perpetually looking ahead to next term to see what they can do better, this seemed like a good time to take you on the guided tour. As always, I'd love to hear other suggestions or provide clarification - shout that stuff out in the comments.

Organization

Only a couple of tools from the list have actually survived. I really loves me some plain 'ol pen-and-paper for todo lists and other random scrawlings. I still think Remember the Milk is an excellent tool; I just find the paper method so familiar and flexible that that's what I tend to stick to.

• Google Calendar is still my go-to. Everything, but everything, goes on there. (Ok, not work appointments, because Groupwise still doesn't talk to Google securely, but everything else.) Since I use Thunderbird for my school email, I've added the Lightning and Provider extensions so that I don't have to leave my email to schedule stuff. It's particularly helpful because Google Calendar allows sharing, so my significant other and I can see one another's calendars, as well as the ones for various community groups I work with.
  
• Evernote has become more and more my electronic brain. I keep webshots, emails, copies of documents, anything and everything I might need to refer to again. Because the tagging in Evernote is so flexible, I can search for things easily and quickly. Helpful when I'm digging for that-one-newspaper-article-about-that-one-thing-I-wanted-to-include-in-that-paper...

Writing

This one has changed enormously. It's a much shorter list now, as I've filtered down to just the tools that are most helpful to me and let the others go.

• MS Office for Mac is still the ubiquitous tool. I had just pulled together the templates I needed for APA format in Open Office when the APA flipped to the 6th edition this summer. Still haven't taken time to recreate the new templates in Open Office, so I'm limping along on the ones in Word. Drat.
• Open Office is still a favorite tool to write in for all of the original reasons I liked it. Easy to use, free, has fantastic word prediction. Now, if I could just get those templates put together...
• Vue not only does great mind mapping, you can attach objects (documents, images, web addresses, etc.) to each of the nodes, then create a presentation that's completely non-linear out of it. So fun.
• MacSpeech Dictate was just recently purchased by the maker of its speech recognition engine, Dragon Naturally Speaking. Since Dragon is, by far, the more developed of the two programs, I'm really looking forward to the enhancements that could come out of it. Dictate is a huge help in working with large blocks of quoted (or noted) text; I've also used it to transcribe interviews from my Livescribe Pulse pen.

Research

This set actually hasn't changed much, but there are some new features in the tools I use. I'll highlight those.

• Zotero is still one of my absolutely favorite tools. With the addition of collaborative groups, syncing, formatable notes, and the new Word for Mac plug-in, I'm just a happy, happy camper. Zotero makes bibliographic management a snap.
• Skim doesn't currently have any shiny new features, but it's still rock-solid and handles PDFs like a champ. Read to me, Skim, so that I'll actually pay attention through those lengthy and complex sentences composed of multiple polysyllabic words.
• Mendeley does have shiny new features! The one-click web importer is downright simple, and collaborative annotations make Mendeley more and more a social research tool.
  
• Delicious, Google Reader, and Wikitap are still in my well-beloved-and-well-used list.
  

Are You My Tweep?

There was a cell phone company that, not long ago, had a commercial that gave stats on how many people were tweeting right now, then followed it with the number of people who had no idea what tweeting was. At first glance, Twitter seems rather self-promoting. You throw 140 characters of what you're thinking out into the world. However, there are great reasons for students to use Twitter; most of which have already been covered in other venues. Here's a few:

• College Student's Guide: Twitter 101
• 25 Twitter Tips for College Students
• Twitter for Academia

Accessible Twitter Applications

The Twitter website itself has some accessibility issues. But don't despair! There are alternate ways to access Twitter. Here's a few accessible ways to do so:

• Accessible Twitter is a website alternate for the Twitter website, but ensures accessibility
• Qwitter is a Twitter client designed for blind and low vision users, compatible with screenreaders
• Tweets60 is an accessible version for the Nokia S60 smartphone

You can follow Disability Resources on Twitter at @EqualAccessSOU.