Altruism as a Motivational Factor in Student Technology Adoption

Inclusivity has become a cherished value within academia, as both cultural norms and legislation prod our educational system to improve access for marginalized communities. Interest in accessibility is on the rise, as recent studies estimate that 11 percent of our students have declared at least one disability (National Center for Education Statistics). In the United States, the rights of students with disabilities are guaranteed through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as well as a patchwork of state and federal statutes aimed at improving access to education. Developing pedagogies that enhance access for all students requires that we examine our practices in the classroom. Many educators and instructional technologists are embracing the concept of Universal Design (Mace, 1988) by striving for texts and teaching environments that can be of use to all students, rather than demanding that students declare their disabled status in order to receive specialized accommodation. The texts through which we communicate the substance of our courses (e.g., syllabi, readings, lecture notes) are of particular interest to the current research, which focuses on the reaction of able-bodied students to the introduction of EPUB, a relatively new and highly accessible document format. As Kress (2005) explained, this topic is both technological and political. Accessibility is not simply a state of being, it is a status that is given or denied by those who control the means of access. Printed books – for centuries, the primary platform for information transfer – are inaccessible to those without sight unless assistive technologies are made available to the affected audience. Whether such interventions are adopted easily or contentiously depends on the majority’s interest in providing access. Universal Design advocates a single solution that works for all; as such, any successful effort to improve the accessibility of our documents must first win the approval of the majority. In the case of EPUB versus PDF, the choice of document format is more than semantics – this discussion pits our traditional fixed-layout designs (also known as pages) against a modern reflowable presentation style. To elaborate the fundamental importance of this issue, it will be necessary to clarify a number of concepts that typically go unexamined. Our digital era compels us to leave behind notions of the book as a collection of printed paper rectangles bound between covers for a more essentialist idea: the book as a self-contained, portable collection of content that affords both presentation and navigation capabilities. The concepts of being self-contained and portable are key, because texts that do not satisfy those objectives (e.g., webtexts) require ubiquitous Internet access – a concept which disadvantages students without home Internet access, whose only off-campus connectivity may come from bandwidth-limited cellphone plans. Just as importantly, webtexts rely on the publisher to maintain uninterrupted online storage while self-contained portable documents may be downloaded and archived by the students themselves, guaranteeing access to key texts during future semesters. Digital documents exhibiting these properties are often called e-books, although their contents might amount to only a single page. This study’s participants interacted with two e-book formats: the ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF) and the less well-known EPUB (not an acronym). As such, it is important to explain the concerns over their use that inspired this research. Prior to the arrival of Adobe’s PDF technology, exchanging “native documents” was the status quo. This practice suffered from several disadvantages: the recipient needed to own the same software used by the author, graphics might fail to appear when the document was opened, and the recipient needed to install and activate the same fonts used by the author to avoid unwanted text re-wrap (due to the substituted font’s differing character width). PDF resolved these issues by encoding fonts and images into a single file that could be viewed and printed using Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader software. PDF’s success in ameliorating the exigency created by the exchange of native file formats resulted in its rapid – and largely unexamined – adoption within academia. Soon after, the advent