Education

The Next Textbook?

Finding—or Creating—Alternative Instructional Materials for College Students

By Robert Martinengo

Colleges face a number of challenges in providing academic accommodations to students with disabilities. The college’s Disabled Student Services office, or equivalent, is charged with leveling the playing field, providing students with an accessible alternative to the instructional materials required by the instructor. A 2004 report issued by the Institute for Higher Education Policy entitled Opportunities for Students with Disabilities notes the many challenges facing disabled students and their service providers, including resistance from college administration, faculty, and IT departments, as well as from publishers and occasionally, from students themselves.

Figure 1: Publisher Thomson Learning has a four-step online form for colleges requesting electronic files for students with disabilities.

In this mix of competing influences, technology is sometimes seen as the solution, other times as the problem, and always as a wild card that may tip the balance toward or away from the student having a successful experience with alternate media. This article focuses on the growing trend of colleges asking publishers for electronic versions of printed textbooks.

The Problem with Textbooks

Textbooks have often been a lightning rod for contention and controversy. Whether the concern is content, price, or even weight, people are always finding issues with textbooks. The difficulty posed by textbooks to students who cannot read standard print has not been a major concern of publishers, but that is changing. Colleges have been going directly to publishers to request electronic files of textbooks their students are using. This grassroots market in electronic books has gone unannounced, but not unnoticed, by the publishing industry.

Thomson Learning is the second largest supplier of college textbooks, with about 25% of the market, according to Educational Marketer magazine. Edie Williams, Thomson’s director of outbound licensing, has been tracking requests since 1999. She reported that Thomson received 4,536 requests for files in 2004. That year, 58% of the requests were for Microsoft Word files, 39% were for PDF, and 3% were for ASCII text files. “We are often able to fill requests within 48 hours”, Williams notes, “and we continue to work with DSS professionals to improve our responsiveness in handling requests. As more of our core product is electronic rather than print, it will be more easily made accessible.”

Jane Smith, of textbook supplier Bedford, St. Martins, notes that they provided 422 files upon request in 2004, which was almost twice the number provided in 2003. “We are working toward making everything as accessible as possible,” says Smith, who has been working with colleges since the company received six e-text requests in 1998. “We have moved to unlocked PDFs as the first default. We’ve made great strides this past year in having an outside agency look at our software and websites.”

Colleges have not had a centralized resource to assist them in obtaining files from publishers. The California Community College system became the pioneer in the field when it opened the Alternate Text Production Center in 2002, as a central clearinghouse for publisher requests for the 109 community colleges in the state. The ATPC has over 4,500 files in its inventory, from around 300 different publishers. The ATPC is also responsible for Braille production, and is able to provide embossed Braille copies of textbooks to outside colleges for a fee.

The Center for Accessible Publishing is a new organization started by a university student who was frustrated by the difficulties of obtaining electronic files. Modeled after the ATPC, the Center will operate the Accessible Text Clearinghouse, which will provide a single point of contact for colleges and publishers to exchange electronic files of college textbooks.

Figure 2: The California Community College’s Alternate Text Production Center in Ventura, California.

E-books vs. E-text, Supply vs. Demand

In commercial terms, e-books have not achieved the claims made for them at the height of the dot-com bubble. There seems to be little consumer demand for digitized versions of books already available in print. But individuals who read formats other than print are eager to see the e-book market expand, as long as the product is compatible with assistive technology. Dazzled by extravagant sales forecasts, investors chased a nonexistent e-book mass market, while overlooking the smaller market, and the very real needs, of the print-disabled. Times are changing, however.

At a recent conference put on by the Open eBook Forum (now the International Digital Publishing Forum), entitled E-Books in Education, advocates for accessibility were featured on a panel discussion that proved to be one of the highlights of the day. The Association of American Publishers has also acknowledged the growing demand for accessible books, and devoted a full day of the 2004 Rights and Permissions Advisory Committee Conference to accessibility topics.

This commercial attention to accessibility is a welcome change, but is not without its own challenges. As accessibility goes mainstream, students with disabilities, and their loose support network of nonprofits, federal programs, and college services, should be on the watch for reductions in program funding, due to the perception of accessibility issues being solved by technology. The challenge will be to ensure that accessibility is adopted as a core academic principal, not as an afterthought.

E-text in Education

For students, these issues are usually irrelevant to the task at hand: doing their class work, and getting a good grade. Many college assignments are based on reading and writing, so any impairment that limits these functions, whether physical or cognitive, poses real challenges. Electronic text addresses these issues in two ways: by presenting information through another sensory channel, and through the potential to integrate that information with aids to studying and writing.

The most common use of e-text is the conversion of text to speech. This can be synchronized with the pages of a book, using a program such as Kurzweil 3000. Or the audio can be saved as wav or mp3 files, and played back on inexpensive consumer equipment. The quality of synthetic speech has improved dramatically in the last few years, and the proliferation of MP3 players makes this an attractive option for many students. New software such as eClipseReader and eClipseWriter lets users create their own navigable audio books, with links to page numbers and chapter headings.

Another use of electronic text is conversion to Braille. Duxbury, and other vendors, make software that can handle basic conversion of a text file in to contracted Braille, which substitutes contractions for certain word and letter combinations. These Braille files can be output to a refreshable Braille display, or to an embosser, for the production of a durable paper copy. There are also methods to convert graphics in to raised line drawings.

Another quality of electronic text is its ability to be searched, highlighted, annotated, excerpted, etc. Vendors of assistive technology promote these features as powerful tools to aid students with disabilities with their studies. These tools would be equally effective for students who do not identify as disabled, if they had access to the same electronic text. While accessibility features are a requirement for some students, they may prove to be a preference for others – the marketplace will tell the story.

Limitations & Legality

E-text is not the answer to every accessibility need. So far, there is limited support for anything other than text-based subjects. Audio presentation of mathematics and science is beyond the capability of most assistive technology, and even the latest versions of Braille software are not capable of rendering complex textbooks. Trained transcribers are essential to ensure the transcribed book is an accurate counterpart to the printed edition.

File formats continue to pose many challenges. Plain text files offer limited utility—like trying to read a book on a scroll instead of turning pages. PDF is a complex format that can accurately represent visual formatting, but can pose serious accessibility challenges (see Accessible Content Magazine, Summer 2005 for help with PDF Accessibility). The DAISY Consortium, a group devoted to creating standards for digital talking books, has done notable accessibility work with XML, and the U.S. Department of Education has adopted a subset of the DAISY 3 specification as the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard, to be used for K-12 textbooks.

Figure 3: A student worker, who is herself visually impaired, formats an electronic text at the Production Center.

The legal basis for colleges scanning textbooks and converting them to electronic text is also unclear. While Congress passed an amendment to U.S. copyright law in 1996 that created an exemption for the production of accessible formats, it does not specifically exempt educational institutions from having to seek permission from the publisher. However one chooses to interpret the intentions of congress, colleges have been scanning books by the thousands, and it has yet to be the basis of a lawsuit.

Conclusion

For a college student with a disability, having their books in a format they can really use can be the difference between passing and failing. For the textbook publishing industry, students with disabilities may be the foundation of the instructional material market of the future. If publishers embraced the accessibility market, they could tap in to the creativity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness of these students and the thriving assistive technology industry. Accessible digital content has the potential to benefit all students, teachers, and publishers.

About the Author

ROBERT MARTINENGO has been a studio director at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, in Los Angeles. He joined the California Community College system and began approaching textbook publishers directly on behalf of students. He is currently the supervisor of the Alternate Text Production Center in Ventura, California.