That sounds great and I'm glad that has been your experience. In Canada, it has ranged from an accessible PDF from McGrawHill in 3 days to 800 pages of text with no breaks, chapters, or pix from Pearson, to inaccessible formats in a few weeks that need to be transcribed into something else, to no reply at all from most of the small publishers...hit and miss at best.
Standards would be so nice!
Lou, you touch on a topic of huge importance in Canada right now (and I'm sure everywhere). We really need an international strategy ( I know there is a clear one through WIPO- world intellectual property organization in their report of April of this year) - the whole issue of copyright and intellectual property is so bogus when applied to the 'one for' copy for a student with a diagnosed disability.
You may be interested to learn of the Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post Secondary Education subcommittee website at http://www.cacuss.ca/en/11-cadsppe/information.lasso and their website to organize alternate format information at http://www.uottawa.ca/cacuss/index.html This site has publishers contact info and infor for using AMICUS so that there is a focus on getting the file in appropriate accessible format from the publishers (when that is possible - don't get me started on that!) and sharing the file with other users so that there is less duplication.
It works sort of well some of the time but if we don't bang on some doors, they will never open.
I understand various states have a centralized approach - would love to hear how its working - or not- from you all.
:) susan
Janet you are so right. We're facing a situation at our college where the course has been created in WebCT. We were confident that students have been fairly competent in copy & paste to extract the text from WebCT and paste it into Kurzweil or other screen readers - and then use Dragon (version 9 is about 98% accurate) to speak their answers.
Until we encountered OPUS (and perhaps someone has a thought here). It is courseware development that captures the screen and displays kinda like a jpg - hence no text to copy and paste - totally inaccessible for our students who need screenreaders.
So we've gone to hiring a person to type in txt everything captured in OPUS and embedding in the course material so the screen readers will work.
And I'm happy to say our college has discontinued OPUS and mandated the software selection committee to make 'accessibility' part of their checklist.
one step forward, and 3 behind it seems some days...
Lou, you touch on a topic of huge importance in Canada right now (and I'm sure everywhere). We really need an international strategy ( I know there is a clear one through WIPO- world intellectual property organization in their report of April of this year) - the whole issue of copyright and intellectual property is so bogus when applied to the 'one for' copy for a student with a diagnosed disability.
You may be interested to learn of the Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post Secondary Education subcommittee website at http://www.cacuss.ca/en/11-cadsppe/information.lasso and their website to organize alternate format information at http://www.uottawa.ca/cacuss/index.html This site has publishers contact info and infor for using AMICUS so that there is a focus on getting the file in appropriate accessible format from the publishers (when that is possible - don't get me started on that!) and sharing the file with other users so that there is less duplication.
It works sort of well some of the time but if we don't bang on some doors, they will never open.
I understand various states have a centralized approach - would love to hear how its working - or not- from you all.
:) susan
Janet you are so right. We're facing a situation at our college where the course has been created in WebCT. We were confident that students have been fairly competent in copy & paste to extract the text from WebCT and paste it into Kurzweil or other screen readers - and then use Dragon (version 9 is about 98% accurate) to speak their answers.
Until we encountered OPUS (and perhaps someone has a thought here). It is courseware development that captures the screen and displays kinda like a jpg - hence no text to copy and paste - totally inaccessible for our students who need screenreaders.
So we've gone to hiring a person to type in txt everything captured in OPUS and embedding in the course material so the screen readers will work.
And I'm happy to say our college has discontinued OPUS and mandated the software selection committee to make 'accessibility' part of their checklist.
one step forward, and 3 behind it seems some days...
