Accessible Instructional Materials
Is Your School Ready?
A movement is
underway to make classroom books accessible to students with
disabilities. It was sparked by IDEA 2004, and now textbook publishers
are beginning to create accessible digital versions of their books.
Many books are available online. Have you prepared your plan to make your district's curriculum accessible?
Where do you even begin? There are two things to consider.
1) You will need accessible eBooks
2) You need technology to make those eBooks accessible
First, acquire books in accessible formats
Several
organizations (Bookshare, RFB&D, NIMAC) are responsible for
providing materials to students who qualify under the copyright
exemption laws (only 1-3% percent of students receiving special
education services). But, IDEA also says that State
Education Agencies are responsible for ensuring that children with
disabilities who need accessible instructional materials receive them
in a timely manner even if they DON'T qualify under the copyright
exemption laws.
How many of your students could benefit from accessible book formats? For a quick picture, try our Universal Screening Tool (PDF)
in your district. The best way to acquire these materials is to
negotiate with your textbook publishers. Talk with your curriculum
committee about negotiating the purchase of those materials. We offer
sample contract language you can use in your negotiations on the Accessible Instructional Materials section of our website.
Consider this...instead of paying for a printed textbook for each
student, offer to pay for printed textbooks and eBooks in accessible
formats at the time of purchase or adoption of instructional materials.
Next - provide the technology to read your eBooks
Once
you acquire accessible eBooks, you will need the right technology to
read them. Consider whole-school solutions as well as devices for
individual students.
Whole-School Solutions
Perhaps
the most versatile and essential tool when providing access to eBooks
is a text reader. They make the eBook files accessible and offer
reading comprehension tools. The new version of our Read:OutLoud
software is compatible with the widest range of eBooks and features
native compatibility with NIMAS, DAISY, and PDF files without
conversion! For widespread adoption (Universal Design for Learning), we
offer an affordable whole-school license to Read:OutLoud. Over 4,000 schools purchased Unlimited Site Licenses to Read:OutLoud in just the past two years.
Find out why. 
Watch our 5-minute Read:OutLoud product demonstration.
Even
after you obtain eBooks from your publishers, you will likely have some
books or book files that are still not available in accessible formats.
After you get permission from the publisher, there are ways to make the
printed text accessible through OCR software using EasyConverter (coming soon). To
utilize EasyConverter's OCR scanning capabilities, just connect a
scanner, and you can easily convert printed textbook pages into
accessible digital formats. EasyConverter is also a powerful file
conversion tool. It's the only software tool available that quickly
converts all of your digital text files (Kurzweil, Microsoft Word, PDF,
and even images containing text) into accessible formats (DAISY/NIMAS,
MP3, Braille, and Large Print).
Individual Student Solutions
To meet the needs of individual students, we offer two portable text reader solutions—the Intel® Reader and ClassMate Reader.
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The Intel Reader
is a portable scan and read device. Students can take pictures of
printed documents and the Intel Reader automatically converts them into accessible files, which are read aloud.
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Continue the Learning
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We're offering a series of 4
email messages to share more about the AIM initiative.
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