I scanned a book for a student who was blind who was taking a distance
learning course and e-mailed it to him chapter by chapter.  He said that it
was the best access he had ever had to a book. (He used JAWs to read it.)
He deleted the material after the course was over.

I agree that tapes are unwieldy.

Sharon Yazak, Coordinator
Disability Support Services
Academic Support Center
Montana State University-Billings
Billings MT 59101
(406) 657-2283 v/t
[log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Chapin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2001 7:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
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