Paul,

Your doing a great job. Bravo.

Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Chapin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 9:05 AM
Subject: Re: Books on Tape


> I'd like to thank everybody who responded.  I found it very useful.
>
> Let me put my question in context so you can see where I'm coming from.
> Last semester we started a pilot project to provide course material to a
> blind student in electronic form rather than creating tapes.  The
materials
> are either articles or sections of books.  There wasn't a single
"textbook"
> in the group.  We've had student workers scan in the material, do some
basic
> editing and then create a link from an electronic version of the course
> syllabus to the readings.  The student, who uses JAWS, can then access the
> material from her system with all the nice navigation features that JAWS
> gives you such as the ability to jump forward by paragraph and the like.
> We're still working the bugs out of the system but so far our test student
> is excited by the results.
>
> This March I'm suppose to do a presentation at the NERCOMP meeting on this
> project.  I would like to be able to talk briefly about the advantages and
> disadvantages of doing this over using tapes.  My impression is that even
> with tone indexing, finding particular pages or passages can take some
time
> with a tape, or have I missed understood?
>
> In general, would you rather get course material in electronic form to use
> with a screen reader or on tape?
>
>
> Paul Chapin
> Curricular Computing Specialist
> Amherst College
> 413 542-2144
>