Listen to Show 72

Here's part three of my conversation with Ron Stewart on accessible instructional materials. Don't forget to go back and hear part 1 in Show 70 and part 2 in Show 71 if you haven't yet.

Some additional resources that we talked about in this episode include:

Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Reading Rights
http://www.readingrights.org/

World Intellectual Property Organization
http://www.wipo.int/portal/index.html.en

NIMAS
http://nimas.cast.org/

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS

Beth Case: Welcome to the Disability 411 podcast. This is episode 72, and I'm your host, Beth Case. Today we have the last part of an interview that I did with Ron Stewart on accessible instructional materials. If you haven't listened to episode 70 or 71, I might recommend that you go back and listen to those; it will give today's podcast a little more context. But even if you don't have time to listen to those right now, this one still should make sense on its own. In today's episode, we look at ways that you personally can get involved to make a difference to help make accessible materials available to the students who need them. So, let's listen.

Beth: We always have to look at things at a case-by-case basis. There's never going to be a solution that is accessible for everyone. But if we can make things as accessible as possible for most students, it really reduces that workload.

Ron Stewart: Well, and it also allows us to re-purpose our resources. And everybody knows how limited resources are right now, and it doesn't look to be getting any better in the short term. But if we can take that $100,000 we're spending now to just produce general curriculum, and it comes in the door being accessible to some agreed-to standards and guidelines, going back to what we were talking about earlier, then the local production capacity can then re-purpose our resources to do the value added that those unique students need. And let me give you an example. When I was at Oregon State, one my most interesting experiences I had was a deaf-blind student who was a computer science major.

Beth: That's a bit of a challenge.

Ron: That was a major challenge.

Beth: [laughter]

Ron: And those particular needs were beyond my experience base. Because I hadn't... I mean, I can theoretically think through how this may work, because luckily for me, the student had fine tactile, so they could read Braille. They didn't read Braille, but they could read Braille. So what I had to do was I had to reach out to my community of folks that I knew and talk to the deafblind resource center up the road. So that's where, if we… right now, that would be a challenge that most people who work in this field couldn't tackle.

Beth: Right. And with your expertise, if you couldn't come with a solution, then you certainly can't expect most other people who are doing it to do it. [laughter] Because they don't have the same kind of technical expertise that you have.

Ron: Well, and I know a lot more than I did then, too, so that helps. [laughter] But if we know that what we're getting conforms to this particular schema, and that it's what we call “universally designed”... I'm getting away from using that term. It's “functionally usable”. I think it's a better term. And then we can actually take and actually use our resources to serve those students who don't even get on the radar screen on most campuses. And those are the students with very, very unique circumstances, like a deafblind computer science major, that it's going to cost you a lot of money to serve that student. But you're much farther ahead, and I think that's really where we got to look at this, because as I look what's happening on the international landscape. And let's just a talk about the English-speaking world. State by state, country by country, province by province, district by district, campus by campus, everybody's going about this differently.

Beth: There really needs to be a unified, central effort.

Ron: [Overlapping conversation] Well, there needs to be some kind of coordination. There's lots of reasons folks aren't all going to glom on to a single system. Let's go to the AccessText as an example. In the Access... Well, not even just in the AccessText, some of the other systems where they do file, they’re book-dating services, for want of a better term.

Beth: Okay.

Ron: Institution X contacts institution Y to share some materials that are done. Well, in a lot of these national initiatives, or even regional initiatives, you no longer have total control over your operation. You are outsourcing it somebody else. Well, in some instances, that's fine. You're going to have other institutions, and I worked at one that had some of this attitude, that we had to do it in house. We could not outsource the command and control or the management of the system. We have our own management database and those kinds of things. We also see, I'm thinking about two different K-12 systems, where one state that the mandate has been from the state that everything that exists and everything around AIM in our state will be managed by ourselves. It all has to be within the state borders. So they can't look at some of these third-party options. Now, if we could work through some of the legal issues on a national level that that may make that easier, whereas I'm looking at another state that is pretty far down the road, and they outsource almost everything that they do to the national, authorized entities.

Beth: Is it a matter of quality control or why are these institutions not wanting to outsource?

Ron: Well, there's... No. 1, when you outsource, you have to ensure that you remain responsible for it. You can delegate a duty, but you can't delegate a responsibility. So what happens if that outsource fails? What's your Plan B? The other issue is the whole spectrum of interpretation of copyright law.

Beth: [Overlapping conversation] Which is about as big a problem as DRM.

Ron: They are sister problems. I don't know; they're Siamese twins. I don't know; [laughter] it's just... But you got the DRM issues, which is people trying protect their intellectual property from pirating, which is an issue. And a legitimate one that we need to recognize. And then you have the whole issue of interpretation of copyright and how do you honor copyright and also meet your obligation under civil rights law? And there's no case law, there are no legal guidance that we could go and look at saying “In regards to accessible curriculum materials this is permissible and this isn't”. So that leaves it to each local entity to develop their own interpretations of that.

Beth: Which can be vastly different from entity to entity.

Ron: Yeah, and lawyers tend to be risk adverse anyway. So they're not gonna say go forth. I mean a lot... You know as well as I do about the alt format reproduction programs that were kind of flying under the radar, on our institutions. You know, they were doing this because they had to do it. They got students they have to meet. Needs they had to meet and nobody knew about it until somebody wrote somebody a letter.
Beth, your question was, “what can I do as an individual on my campus or in my educational space of whatever life I live to help us solve these issues?” Number one, you need to work within your local community. You need to make sure the people understand what it means to have accessible curriculum and what it doesn't mean, and what it means if you don't have it. I mean, because if we don't have accessible curriculum, people with disabilities cant' achieve the most important thing we need to do our society and that's to finish school. So, you know, one of the things I talk about when I talk about this issue is the locally produce curriculum. On a lot of institutions and a lot systems were moving towards almost half if not more the curriculum has produced on local campus.

Beth: Right. That’s my experience.

Ron: That's the first place to start. What's going on your campus to ensure that the faculty are aware. Is the administration willing to take the bull by the horns and work towards a campus policy on curricular accessibility as well as a campus policy on technology accessibility because that's where these two intersect. Two, get involved in some of the national initiatives that are going on. If you're an alt format production person, look at the various ways you can get source materials. You should be doing this anyway. You know the last thing you wanna do is actually convert a book.

Beth: [laughter] It's the last thing anybody really wants to do. It's a lot of work.

Ron: But yet there schools out there than don't even look at outside sources because over the years they found that that don't work. My request of you, listeners, is that you start to look at what Bookshare is doing. Look at where RFB&D is going. Look at where some of the open source, like Project Gutenberg, and look at what those materials are. And you give feedback back to those organizations about “Well, it's great that you're doing this but here is what I really need” or “If you could do this in this way.” And we start to get that... those communication loops going, because to what tends to happen is the book goes to an authorized entity, the authorized entity produces the book, the end user gets the book. And there is no bigger system out there kind of looking at “Is it what we needed?” Often times what ends up happening is you go to a third party provider, you get new materials and you find out they don't work.

Beth: And then you just don't go back.

Ron: You don't go back and you don't give feedback to the person who produced it. Letting you know that this didn't work for me and here's why. I think that’s going to be critically important as we look at that grant that Bookshare and NCAM just got. You know they are developing techniques for image accessibility. One of the things that I see happen again and again and again in this space is no end user testing. If someone develops a system, here's a way we need to approach this and they send it out there and “Oh, that's the greatest thing since sliced bread.” and someone goes off with it but yet we never actually measure the impact of that particular technique or strategy on the end user who needs to benefit from it.

Beth: Right, and that you would think that would be important.

Ron: You would think so. And then probably, getting back to how you get involved, there's the Right to Read Coalition. Are you familiar with that?

Beth: Yes.

Ron: Is it Reading Rights? [overlapping conversation].

Beth: Reading Rights and actually Disability411 is part of it.

Ron: Okay, well that was a national initiative that grew out of the Kindle accessibility issues.

Beth: Right.

Ron: So, if you are able to get involved in that effort and contribute to it and start to filter some of that information back to your sphere of influence. And then perhaps when we see things like the language in the Higher Education Act, one of the things that has been somewhat disturbing for me is that has never been funded. That legislation was passed but Congress chose not to fund it.

Beth: So, perhaps some letters to our congressman encouraging some funding to be placed there?

Ron: Right, or that it be made a priority because you have to understand how Washington works. It need, not only does it need to be funded, but it also needs to be assigned to the appropriate body to move the issue forward. So, yeah, when see that type of language come up in proposed legislation whether it be on your campus, for policy and procedures, whether in your local state, some kind of state statue around the curricular accessibility, that you look at the language in that and your national associations will help you with that to a certain extent. Another one is the whole thing about copyright. Now the WIPO, but I can't remember what WIPO stands for, but its International Intellectual Property Organization, is looking at this whole issue of accessibility but from a very blind/VI perspective so that if we look at the majority of the students who are print disabled, they are... have a cognitive disability. So that we ensure that language that comes out there in your state makes sense.

Beth: And that is real common misconception is that whenever we are talking about electronic text, alternate formatting, any of that terminology that people think immediately to blind students and not realizing that there is a lot of other students with different disabilities that can really benefit from that.

Ron: Right and the other thing that probably will help is if people start to use common language. I know that's one of the things that's impacted our work at AHEAD is we talked about e-text. What's that mean in the gamut of alternative format? And so now, we're really looking to use the language of” instructional materials” and the same thing is now occurring in the K-12 space if you hear AIM, Accessible Instructional Materials.

Beth: I like that phrase. I think I may start trying to use that one.

Ron: Well, and it only also speaks to more than just the print.

Beth: Exactly.

Ron: So maybe that's how... Those are some things that you can do. I know that most of us that worked in this field on a national level, really appreciate input from people. One of the things I'm looking at now is I need to refresh the AHEAD e-text website because the contents were a little on the stale side. And I've sent several requests out to some of my communities that I work with for feedback on what you need and you probably already know the answer to this question. How much feedback did I get?

Beth: Very little to none.

Ron: Yeah, very little to none. So, if this is important to you, engage in the conversations that are going on and in particular get outside of the disability box. We really got to stop ghettoizing disability accommodations to the educational space. We need to talk to faculty. We need to talk to our administration. If your system has a curriculum and instruction department, they need to be engaged because the issues need to come from them. If we're going to have impact on the larger space. It doesn't do us any good to talk to our choirs because that's not going to fix this issue. In order for, to see commercially available Accessible Instructional Materials, the request for those materials need to come from the curriculum decision makers. When a faculty is looking in a textbook from publisher X, publisher Y or publisher Z ,can we in our local community provide that information? This publisher is very good to work with from the accessibility standpoint? And I don't want... That can't be the single criteria for selection of curriculum materials because that's going to cause all kinds of technological problems and it informs our process.

Beth: That's when the publishers are going to really start paying attention.

Ron: When the customers ask for the accessible materials and actually require it. In particular, when we're looking at the whole e-book and the electronic curriculum rage that's going on and yes it is really hyped because if we look at the percentage of materials that are available in the electronic books, it's about 1% of the total books available. But that's once again, that's a marketplace issue. The fact that those books could not be used with commonly available assistive technology is criminal, especially when the fix is so simple.

Beth: I think that's a great note to close on. Well Ron, you’ve certainly given us a lot to think about and some very exciting information so I really appreciate you taking so much time to talk with me.

Ron: Very glad to be able to do so. [background music]

Beth: And that wraps up the interview that I had with Ron Stewart. I hope that you all agree that it was worth listening to all of it even though I had to break it up over a few shows. There was just too much good information there, I couldn't stand to cut any of it. So again if you haven't listened to the first two parts, go back to episode 70 and 71 and catch up on those. I also wanted to remind you all that the Disability411 does have a presence on Facebook and on Twitter. If you're not following me there, then head over to disability411.com and there will be the links for signing up for our Disability411 fan page and for following me on Twitter. And of course, on our website, you can find show notes, links, all of our past episodes, transcripts, blogs and other stuff. So until next time, this is Beth Case with the Disability411 podcast.

Beth: The Disability411 podcast is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 3.0 United States License which means you can share our podcast, you just can't make any money off it. Visit our website at disability-411.com to find show notes, past shows and transcripts of all the episodes as well as useful links, blogs and much more. Email us at disability411@jinkle.com. Music brought to you by the Brobdingnagian Bards and used with permission.