If they offer books on the Web, publishers fear they will lose hard-copy sales. Director of Special Education Donna Palley and her colleagues in the Concord, NH, schools have been encouraging publishers to provide digitized text. In the meantime, they are doing a lot of the work themselves, currently digitizing their entire high school English and elementary literature curricula. These digitized versions will give students with learning, attention, and physical disabilities access to reading materials and allow them to participate in class. But the process isn't easy.
Teachers often end up laboriously typing in the text themselves.
In CAST's professional training sessions, Stahl encourages educators to scan books to make print-based materials more accessible. Fortunately, recent changes in copyright laws have helped. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Act of 1997 says that teachers no longer need the publisher's permission to alter material in order to make it accessible to children with disabilities. To speed this process, CAST is helping to establish e-text standards for publishers. Co-Executive Director Anne Meyer recently served on the Texas Task Force on Electronic Textbook Accessibility, which presented recommendations to the Texas Legislature for making textbooks more accessible to students with disabilities.