The accessibility of e-books is almost the hottest topic at disability-education-disability conferences. Because it is new, most of us don't know nearly enough about it.  We don't know how it impacts our students, and we don't know what re the future prospects for accessibility.
EASI provided a very popular Webinar on the accessibility of e-book formats a month ago, and you will want to see its slides and watch its recording. Go to:
http://easi.cc/archive/e-readers/resources.htm

EASI Webinars can help you with valuable, interesting and exciting information in our Webinars in the next 2-3 months.
Webinars scheduled during April, May and June will cover how people with disabilities can read a growing number of e-books and give a good introduction on how to author accessible e-books. The authoring tools will cover those aimed at a beginning single person wanting a couple accessible e-books and slightly more complex authoring tools for creating larger numbers of books and those with more complex format issues.

HAVE NO FEAR! YOU TOO CAN DO IT!

Three of the 5 Webinars will cover reading and authoring applications for DAISY books The other 2 Webinars will deal more with the epub format and with converting some of the specialized document formats used by some commercial providers of e-books and e-book readers. 

I can't urge you too strongly to take a serious look at attending these or at least getting their recordings.  We are on the cutting edge of the coming e-book wave.  Grab the wave and take the ride!!!

The EASI 4-part, fee-based Series: Better E-books with DAISY EPUB and More is scheduled for:
April 10 and 17; May 1 and 8
Times all daylight saving: 11 AM Pacific, noon Mountain, 1 PM Central and 2 PM Eastern
Weeks 1-2, (April 10 and 17), will focus on the DAISY authoring and reading products developed by Dolphin.
Presenter: Jeff Bazer from Dolphin Computer Access in the US.
 Jeff will discuss EASY Converter, EASY Producer, and Easy Reader which now will read both DAISY and EPUB content.
The buzz is that the epub 3 standard will be highly compatible with the DAISY format. We can expect authoring tools to handle both formats in the near future. Most hardware DAISY players now will handle books in epub2.

Week 3, May 1: Overview of the epub and other e-document formats being used by publishers of e-books
Presenter: Norm Coombs CEO of EASI, Professor Emeritus from RIT
This Webinar will give an introduction to common document formats publishers are using for e-books including books for the Kindle, Nook, Blio and Adobe Digital editions. It will suggest ways that these proprietary formats may be converted to other formats and avoid being reader specific.
 It will point to tools that will enable writers to authorbooks in the epub format and tools to facilitate changing documents from one

Week 4, May 8: Will demonstrate the add-in which will save Word Documents as DAISY Content
Presenter: Craig Mill, Assistive Technology Advisor at CALL Scotland (Communication, Access, Literacy and Learning)
 This free add-in for Microsoft Word has been available for a few years, but it is being constantly simplified and improved. For example, it now handles accessible Math. The presentation will include YouTube videos Mill created to walk users through the process of making personal DAISY content.

EASI Annual Members can register free for the series from http://easi.cc/member/index.htn where you will need your member username and password. We need your registration so we can send participants email updates and log in information
There are some scholarships available at:
http://easi.cc/scholarship.htm

Non-members can register and pay the $225 registration for this 4-part series. You can pay by credit card, check or PO at the link below and select Web conferences and select the date for April 4.
https://www.secure.servsite.com/easi/enrollment/enrollment_pal.shtml

EASI Free 1-hour Webinar: The Cutting Edge of E-book Accessibility
June 11: 11 PM Pacific, Noon Mountain, 1 PM Central and 2 PM Eastern daylight
 Presenter: Norm Coombs, Ph.D. CEO EASI, Professor Emeritus RIT
 The explosion of e-books is changing the face of book publishing and changing the role of book stores. Different vendors of e-books created their unique, proprietary document formats which required their being read in e-readers designed specifically for that format. Imagine having to use different glasses to read print books depending on who was its publisher! Of course, the document format and the specialized e-readers were inaccessible to many people with what used to be called "print disabilities". The DAISY document format opened up a wider and richer reading experience for people with disabilities, but DAISY books were incompatible with commercial e-readers like the Kindle or Nook, and commercial e-book formats were incompatible with DAISY.

Webinar participants will learn which formats are already accessible to them, and they will be introduced to some tools for document format conversion.
Everyone can use the link below to register for this free Webinar:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEFRVmhpOGFlTVN5T09ScWREeDdsVWc6MQ"

The page with the schedule of all currently scheduled Webinars is at
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm




 


 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It's never too late to become what you might have been. George Eliot
Once you choose hope, anything's possible.  Christopher Reeve
Norman Coombs [log in to unmask]

Making Online Teaching Accessible: Inclusive Course Design for Students with Disabilities by Norman Coombs published by Jossey-Bass Oct 10,2010
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470499044.html

 --------------------------- Check out EASI New Synchronous Clinics: http://easi.cc/clinic.htm EASI Home Page http://www.rit.edu/~easi Online courses and Clinics http://easi.cc/workshop.htm Check the EASI Library Web http://www.rit.edu/~easi/lib.htm >>> Error in line 8 of AXSLIB-L.MAILTPL: unknown formatting command <<< -> . . . . . . . . . <-