Accessibility is about more than text-to-speech

I am, as I type this, on my way home from the School Library Journal Leadership Summit in Washington, DC. It was, hands down, one of the best professional development experiences I’ve ever had. I loved the intimacy and the intensity of the summit—it was a small group of people, and we were all in the same room, listening to the same speakers, and discussing the same ideas. It created an atmosphere very different from the large conferences I usually go to, where I’m running from session to session and always feel like I’m missing something—and have a harder time connecting with people who are focusing on similar ideas while at the conference and want to delve a little deeper.

The summit was exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries and give me new ideas and focus. I’m coming home with a lot of ideas to reflect on and implement (and unless I get completely overwhelmed at work the next couple weeks—ha!—I plan to write some more about it).

The theme of the summit was “The New World of Reading” and e-books, unsurprisingly, came up a lot. Friday morning was devoted specifically to speakers who had started e-book projects in their schools, districts, counties, regions, etc., as well as e-book vendors talking about the issue from their perspective.

It was kind of reassuring to hear that even many people who have started using e-books in their schools are still not necessarily 100% sure of the best way to do so; I admire their willingness to explore and jump in and see what happens. It was also reassuring to hear from Chris Harris, who admonished us not to buy e-books for our schools; specifically, he told us to develop ways across districts and curriculums to collectively purchase and share e-resources. Which I agree with, as I don’t have the buying power or the clout to purchase what I want and need on my own, but as an independent school librarian it also means spending time figuring out a consortium (though I’ve already connected with another independent school librarian in CT, and we have some ideas).

One of my major hesitations around e-books (and it was an issue I brought up as often as I could) is full accessibility for students with learning disabilities. One of the questions I submitted to the vendor panel was if e-books were being designed and created with LD students/UDL* principles in mind, and whether they would be fully accessible. The answer from most vendors was that many (but not all) e-books had text-to-speech built in; there was much nodding and smiling from the audience in response.

Sigh.

Yes, text-to-speech is good, and an important accessibility feature, but text-to-speech alone does not make a book fully accessible to all learners. For example, in many platforms where I’ve seen text-to-speech built in, it’s one giant mp3 file, with no navigational ability. How often do you read a book or article (particularly for research purposes) starting with title and author and then read the whole thing straight through without skipping or skimming?

But beyond the quality of text-to-speech, it takes more to make a curricular resource truly universally designed. It also takes more than a built-in dictionary. Yes, those are good things, and I’m glad they’re becoming standard, but I really don’t want them to be the end of these developments. I see so much potential for making more resources more available to more learners that I will be frustrated if we fall short of what I believe is possible.

A truly UDL e-book is like art or porn; I may not know exactly how to define it, but I’ll know it when I see it. And I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe there is something out there that does what I want it to do, and I just haven’t discovered it; if so, I hope someone will point it out to me. Even something close, so I can go to a vendor (my goal is to get better at talking to vendors about what accessible e-resources should look like) with specific suggestions. And, as mentioned above, I know my school and the population I work with in general is too small to have a lot of clout, but if a vendor designs a truly UDL e-resource they will have my undying loyalty and a solemn promise to sing their praises at every opportunity.

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* For those of you unfamiliar with UDL: I like to think of Universal Design for Learning as the cognitive cousin of Universal Design in architecture. The most frequently used example of universal design in architecture is curb cuts; they make sidewalks for accessible for people using wheelchairs, but they also help people dragging suitcases on wheels, or pushing strollers. The burden is placed on the space to meet the needs of those who will use, not on those using the space to adapt themselves to it. Similarly, UDL is based on the idea that it is the curriculum that should adapt to the learners, not the other way around. For a much better, much more thorough explanation (plus UDL guidelines), I highly recommend udlcenter.org.

Four down, four to go

I have been scanning like a madwoman the past couple days, in a hopefully-not-futile attempt to get all of the novels for this Spring's English classes converted to e-text and mp3 before classes resume. I am, clearly, reaping the rewards for having had the audacity to take some of my vacation time as an actual, you know, vacation.

In slicing and scanning these books (side note: I am considering starting a business called the Slice 'n' Scan), I have learned several things:

a) Mass market paperbacks SUCK. Slicing out the pages without thoroughly mangling them takes more concentration than I would like to give to such a task. Also, they have less of a white-space border around the text, so as you inevitably get farther away from cutting right against the spine of the book as you get deeper into the book, there is way less room for error. Also, when you put tape over the inevitable errors, it obscures the text beneath it, meaning text editing, which is a pain.

b) There are two settings for scanning--single-sided, and double-sided. Generally I leave the program set to double-sided, as that's most of what I scan. However, I haven't figured out how to make that the default, which means when I have to re-start the program after an error, or have selected single-sided to rescan a page, I have to remember to turn double-sided scanning back on. Who wants to guess how many times I only copied one side of the pages from an entire chapter before realizing I had failed to do so? Who wants to guess how many times I did that twice in a row?

This process makes my brain get a little. . . squishy.

c) It would be so much less mind-numbing if I could somehow do something else, at least while the pages were scanning, but this task requires *just enough* attention that you can't do something else at the same time. Not that that stops me from trying. I have managed to get the number of unread items in my reader down to 70 (from 532), though I did make use of the "Mark All As Read" button more than once, and neither task really gets my full attention, leading to the types of errors mentioned above.

d) The optical character recognition program is really, really good, but far, far from perfect. It's hard to explain, even if I did have a visual, but I'll try. The text you see on the screen from the page you scan is not necessarily the same as the text the program "sees" and reads. Sometimes I can tell, while editing, what underlying text needs to be corrected. Oftentimes I have no idea until I save a copy as a text file, and see a random string of symbols. And I'll admit that I don't always go back and correct these errors because there is just so much I can do. In reality, I should be doing a LOT more text editing (and I won't get into the details of the types of errors I see and routinely force myself to ignore), but I have to make a decision between having good quality copies of all the books or excellent quality copies of a few of the books. I hate having to make that compromise, but I think I've made the right one.

Also, I can only correct one word at a time. I have no words for how aggravating that is.

We already have a format that's inaccessible to LD students--it's called a book

Justice Dept. Settles Kindle-On-Campus Cases

This is an "old" story by now, but one that's been on my mind. There's a lot of buzz around various e-readers, and people inside and outside of school often ask me about Kindles, Nooks, and, recently, something called Blio (which hasn't been released yet, so I feel better about the fact that I know nothing about it). Because most e-readers have a built in text-to-speech function, a lot of people see them as a natural fit for students who need reading supports. And I agree that they have the potential to be incredibly useful.

Inevitably, of course, people ask if we have/when we will have/why we don't have Kindles/Nooks/e-reader of the moment in the library (which means I'm soon going to have to answer questions about the iPad with a straight face). I always feel oddly pressured in these moments--like I'm not doing something I really should be doing--but when I'm not on the spot, I do feel 100% confident in my decision not to purchase e-readers for the library. First, I don't feel like hitching myself to a particular wagon, especially when proprietary formats and digital rights management stuff is miles away from being figured out. What if I invest thousands in a collection of books for the Kindle, only to have the next great e-reader come out six months later? Will my collection transfer? Doubtful.

Also--as the above news story illustrates--while e-readers have the potential to be very useful for students with learning differences, they're not exactly designed from a universal design/assistive tech perspective. AT applications happened more by accident than by design. I also can't figure out if these e-readers support the file formats that are designed to be accessible to students with learning differences--whether that be DAISY, or Kurzweil, or whatever new program may be developed. All of the commercially viable e-readers I've seen have been designed with pleasure reading in mind, not curricular reading, and those are two different types of reading. Again, there may be features that support curricular reading, but they're not being designed with such features in mind. I am interested to see the results of these studies, as I think they will provide a baseline as e-readers inevitably make their way into the classroom.

There are a lot of interesting and exciting things happening in the development of both e-reader technology and making text more accessible to those with learning disabilities; they are, however, separate trajectories for the time being. But when that changes, I'll be first in line.