Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with Ken Petri, the Director of the Web Accessibility Center at The Ohio State University, about the accessibility of eBooks and eBook readers.  Ken is incredibly knowledgeable on the topic and offered a great deal of information during the interview.  It’s about 25 minutes in length, so I [...]

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From the Booklist Points of Reference blog: Gale  announced yesterday the availability of Biography in Context, a new next-gen resource evolving from, and soon replacing, the Biography Resource Center database. Biography in Context includes the following: Read Speaker text-to-speech technology, available on every page, is an ideal option for struggling readers and the visually impaired [...]

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From an O’Reilly Media press release: For years O’Reilly Media has supplied digital files of our books to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, these ebooks are made available worldwide. And now, through a collaboration with Bookshare, we’ve started making the easy-access DAISY (Digital Accessible Information [...]

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Flashback to fall 2009 and the pilot textbook study with the Kindle DX on 4 college campuses.  Result…failure due to law suit from the National Federation of the Blind.  The device, not accessible.  Luckily Amazon learned from this mistake and went back to development, producing their new Kindle with a voice guide that reads all [...]

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Each week the number of blog posts and articles relating to eBooks, publishing, and eReaders is on the rise.  This week was no exception.  Articles I am linking to focus on the use of readers in elementary schools and higher ed and how fast/slow reading is on devices, future of publishing and business models, textbook [...]

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This posting is taken in full from a U.S. Dept. of Education Press Release. Today, the Departments of Justice and Education announced the publication of a joint ‘Dear Colleague’ letter reaffirming the agencies’ commitment to ensuring students with disabilities have equal access to emerging technologies in institutions of higher education. Under the Americans with Disabilities [...]

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Last years law suit against 4 Universities piloting the Kindle reader as a eTextbook solution has done a lot to guarantee the accessibility of textbooks to all students. Ingram Content Group, working with the American Foundation for the Blind consulting group (AFB Consulting), announced a new disability release for their eTextbook platform – VitalSource.  The [...]

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Lots of great press releases this week from the Frankfurt Book Fair.  Here’s one from B&T. Baker & Taylor and K-NFB Reading Technology Partnership to Deliver an Immersive, Next Generation Reading Experience, Baker & Taylor, Inc( 10/14/2009 ) World’s Premier Distributor of Physical and Digital Media Content Joins Forces with Pioneer in Reading Technologies FRANKFURT, [...]

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An abledbody news article last week discusses the new Kindle DX and it’s text-to-speech program that will read a book aloud.  According to the abledbody article, the Kindle does not go far enough to provide an accessible player to persons with disabilities.  The eBook menus and controls are not audio accessible, limiting access to those [...]

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Being part of the Wright State University community has given me a whole new perspective on students with disabilities.  Approximately 10% of our population is part of this community.  It is very difficult for these students to get their textbooks and other course material in a format appropriate to their needs.  That has just been [...]

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