Books for All

Thunder is a free screen reader with text-only web browser (Webbie) for people with a visual impairment. There’s a good video of it being demonstrated at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCs48NjhHRg.

Note that a screen reader is a different animal to a text reader. A screen reader is usually designed for a visually impaired person and generally reads anything on the screen. If you have sight, screen readers can be irritating because they talk all the time and read out information you don’t care about, and so someone who can see but has reading difficulties would usually opt for a text reader. With a text reader, you point at the text you want to read, or select it, and then the text reader speaks it out. Examples of text readers are WordTalk (www.wordtalk.org.uk); Read and Write Gold (www.texthelp.com); Browsealoud (www.browsealoud.com); ClaroRead (www.clarosoftware.com).

We want some examples of switch-accessible books on the Scottish Accessible Book Library, so here’s a very basic question: what format should these be in?

A single switch user (or two switch, or someone using IntelliKeys, communication aid, eye-gaze or head-controlled mouse etc) should be able to:

1. Open the book from the library
2. start reading where they left off
3. Navigate through the contents and structure
4. Go to a particular chapter or page
5. Turn the pages
6. Swap between the current page and the contents page
7. Change views (e.g. single or two page view, zoom in/out)
8. Use Find/Search and index tools
9. Add bookmarks, text notes and comments

At the moment, we can build books in say Powerpoint and use a switch to swap slides, but the switch access is pretty limited. Or we could use SwitchItMaker or Clicker but both of these require each page to be made manually by cutting and pasting. Or we could use MS Reader, PDF or EasyReader and program a Crick switch box to give the keystroke commands for turning pages etc. But this doesn’t help a single switch user do more than just turn a page. Or we could create a scanning selection set using The Grid, or SAW, say, or use another switch access system like EZ Keys or AssistiveWare.

I don’t know the best way to tackle this, collectively: do we want an ‘add-on’, say, to Acrobat Reader so that a switch user can navigate around a PDF and access it? Or switch accessible Reader that can read PDF, or DOC, or Daisy books. Or a brand new specification for a switch-accessible electronic book format together with switch reader programs to read the books?

Comments please!

The Books for All report recommended creating a Scottish Accessible Resources Network to help schools and pupils share accessible resources and in so doing improve provision and reduce duplication. Over the next few months CALL, LTS and SCRAN are going to work together to create an example database which will list accessible books that have already been created, and will also have some samples of books in a range of accessible formats. We would like to make a range of resources available for download, covering primary and secondary, different subjects, and different types of materials (e.g. reading books, textbooks, worksheets, assessment and exam papers). If you would either like to donate a resource or tell us which books you would like and in which format, please add a comment to this post. The database can have both copyright and non-copyright material and the copyrght resources will only be available for pupils who are copyright exempt, which at the moment means those with either a visual impairment or a physical difficulty in handling books or turning pages.

 This is a very exciting development and we hope it will demonstrate the possibilities for sharing accessible resources, and also provide a mechanism for it - the database will have a facility for teachers to upload adapted resources that they have created.

Please post a comment with the books you would like to donate or see available on the database, and the format (e.g. PDF, Daisy, Clicker, DOC so you can change the font and print it out, plain text so you can print Braille, with symbols, audio etc).