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