What Concord has done is proactively equip themselves to meet a lot of emerging needs. Stahl first worked with Concord six years ago as a consultant, when the district networked its computers and committed to using technology to help students with disabilities. Since then, CAST has turned to Concord as an example. For some students with disabilities, holding, seeing or interpreting a traditional hard copy of a book is a major barrier to independent reading. On the computer screen, though, special software can highlight words or sentences and read the text out loud at a desired pitch and speed.
Educators have found autistic children, for instance, are more engaged by certain voices.
Concord is perhaps best known for its efforts to computerize books. From Shakespeare's plays to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, teachers download text from the main server to a computer. In 1997, Congress gave teachers permission to alter published material to make it accessible to students with disabilities. But scanning, converting and editing each book into electronic text is time consuming. Palley and CAST, the Massachusetts-based organization, have tried to encourage publishers to make electronic text available from the beginning.