We're really very happy indeed to report that today the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) launched a new ‘Print Disability Licence’ to replace the old 'VIP' licence. The new licence has been extended to include all people with a 'print disability' - the previous licence was restricted to people with visual impairment or physical disability. This was clearly inequitable (as we pointed out in the 2007 Books for All Report) and so we are delighted that the new licence addresses this inequality. It means that dyslexic people are now covered under the licence.

Basically, the new licence allows not-for-profit organisations to make Accessible Copies of most published, copyright works and provide them to people with print disabilities who cannot read or access the printed copies. The Accessible Copy may be, for example, Large Print, Braille, audio (synthetic or recorded), digital (with or without text to speech), etc. The licence is free.

We've been waiting for the new licence for quite some time but now that it's here, it means that for example:

• books on the developing Books for All Scotland database can be downloaded for any print disabled pupil, not just those pupils with visual impairment or physical disability;
• books that we, or any other VIP licence holder has made, can be freely shared across the UK provided they are for use by print disabled readers;
• schools and local authorities in the 15 Scottish local authorities who hold VIP licences will be able to make and share their accessible copies with a much larger and wider range of pupils.

For children and young people in schools with dyslexia, learning difficulties, hearing impairment, or who may be on the autistic spectrum, this is very good news.

The new licence is the result of a lot of work by CLA, the Right to Read Alliance (of which CALL is a member) and the publishers' Accessibility Action Group.

Read more about the new licence in the CLA press release.

Chuffed!

(Right, let's get sourcing, adapting, making and sharing these Accessible Books.....)

Accessible Text: Guidelines for Good Practice, is a new publication from CALL Scotland on 'how to' produce accessible resources. 

Making your learning materials accessible to pupils with disabilities or additional support needs is not only good practice but is also necessary to meet equality legislation.  

Part 1 of the book, written by Fran Ranaldi, looks at the design of resources and covers issues such as the choice and size of font, use of images and colour and the visual layout and design. By following the guidelines in to the book, teachers should be able to create learning resources that can be more easily read by pupils with, for example, dyslexia, visual impairment, or learning difficulties.

Part 2, by Paul Nisbet, look at how resources can be made accessible in digital formats. Inceasingly, teachers are creating resources which will be accessed on screen as well as on paper, and this part of the book shows how digital accessibility can be built in when writing the material, with relatively little effort. 

You can download the book for free from CALL Scotland's web site. Altenatively, order print copies (£10) from CALL’s online shop. 

Fran Ranaldi is an experienced teacher who has worked for HMIe on the Review of Education for learners with dyslexia, the Scottish Government on Accessibly Guidelines and within her education authority on several projects for dyslexia and accessibility across the curriculum.

Paul Nisbet is Joint Coordinator of CALL Scotland and works directly with pupils with additional support needs and takes a lead role in current projects to help pupils access curriculum resources, such as Books for All, SQA digital exam papers, and The Scottish Voice. 

Preparation and dissemination of the book is funded by the Scottish Government Schools Directorate.

There's a very interesting article by Bradley Hodges on the AFB AccessWorld site. Bradley describes his first 24 hours with an iPad and the article is full of really interesting insights. From the Books for All perspective, I think this comment is very illuminating:

"There have been two transformative moments in my professional career that I associate with gaining equal access to the printed word. The first was in the mid-'90s, when, as a university researcher, my department obtained a braille embosser and access to the fledgling Internet. One afternoon, a graduate assistant who worked with me casually dropped a braille copy of the cover article from that week's Time magazine on my desk. For the first time, I could read the same text as my sighted colleagues at the same time they did.

The second transformative moment took place Monday evening, April 5, 2010. On that night, I purchased a book from a book store, exactly as my sighted neighbors and colleagues would. I then sat in my den and read that book on the same device as my sighted counterparts.

Just as the introduction of VoiceOver for the Mac and iPhone suddenly and dramatically changed our expectations for ourselves and for those who provide access technology to our community, I believe the advent of accessible iBooks will be viewed by future generations as one of the landmark events in the lives of the blind."

In previous posts I've noted that eBook readers and eBook formats both need to be accessible if there are to fulfil their potential to provide access to books for print disabled people. With the iPad and VoiceOver it looks like it's just happened! (Provided we can actually buy books from the iBookStore in the UK...there's always a fly in the ointment somewhere...)

Bookshare has a new online learning module for people who want to learn more about accessible digital books and resources. It has a US focus, but has good examples, with video and audio clips, of why some pupils need books in accessible digital formats and why it makes a difference to their education.

Bookshare is a huge US database of over 70,000 titles in Daisy 3 and BRF (Braille) formats: it shows what you can do with $32 million over 5 years of federal money. Memo to Victoria Quay: any chance of similar funding for the Books for All Scotland Database?

About 5,000 of the Bookshare titles are available to readers and schools outside the USA - see the Bookshare UK and International Membership pages. Most of the books are fiction titles and so it's worth doing a search on the database (use the Advanced Search button and look for "Books available worldwide") to see if there are books which you want. If there are, you might want to join Bookshare. The cost of international membership is $25 initially plus a $75 annual fee; organisations such as schools and libraries and I think also local authority services can pay for individual pupils (at the individual membership rate), or by the number of books you want to download (30 books for $300, 60 books for $450, 100 books for $600). 

Membership also gives you free access to software for reading the Daisy books - Victor Reader Soft, which is probably best for readers with visual impairment, and Read OutLoud Bookshare Edition, which is designed more with dyslexia or reading difficulties in mind. With the BRF files, you can print out Braille copies.

Barrington Stoke, the Scottish publisher of high interest books for struggling readers, has released eBook versions of six of their titles.

The books are available from the i-Stars web site in Adobe PDF, Microsoft Reader or Zinio Whiteboard formats and you can buy a single home licence (£6.99) or a school licence (£25).

The six Barrington Stoke eBooks are:

• Alien;
• Gremlin;
• Sol Campbell;
• Death Leap;
• Flint;
• Respect!

We have been speaking to Barrington Stoke for some time to encourage them to release digital versions of their books, and so it's great to see it happening. In the wider scheme of things we would rather see publishers selling accessible digital copies of their books at an affordable price, than rely on our collective efforts to scan papers books into the computer and make digital versions.

One great thing about these new books is that they are accessible with text-to-speech: most commercial eBooks can't be read with text-to-speech software because the publisher has protected them to prevent them being copied, which also prevents the text-to-speech software getting at the text to read it. The Barrington Stoke books aren't protected in this way, so you can use text-to-speech to read them out.

The Zinio versions are designed for use on a whiteboard but can also be read on a PC using the free Zinio Reader software.

The Microsoft Reader versions can be opened on a PC or PDA using free Microsoft Reader software and the computer can also read them out if you install the free Microsoft Reader Text-to-speech package. The screenshot on the left below shows a book in Microsoft Reader - the text is being read out and highlighted as it is read.

The PDF books can be read on almost anything - Mac, PC, mobile phone, iPod etc using various versions of Adobe Reader software. The screen shots below shows a PDF book with a clickable index on the left of the screen, and two pages displayed side by side.

We hope that more publishers will follow Barrington Stoke's lead and make their books available in accessible digital formats.

Alistair McNaught, Senior Advisor at JISC TechDis leads the Right to Read Alliance working group on eBooks and his latest report to the Alliance identifies several very promising developments in the area of accessible eBooks.

JISC RSC commissioned research by Shaw Trust into the accessibility of eBooks and the report is available from http://www.techdis.ac.uk/getebookplatforms. The investigation was carried out by testers with print disabilities using their personal assistive technologies and looks at the whole process of acquiring, downloading and reading an eBook. The report gives some really helpful insights for publishers or indeed anyone involved in creating or authoring eBooks and other types of accessible digital resources.

RNIB have created a concise online guide to eBooks which summarises the different formats available, the types of readers available, and lists the main sources of eBooks. You can find this at: www.rnib.org.uk/ebooks.

Craig Mill, e-Learning Advisor at the JISC Regional Support Centre NE in Edinburgh, has written a very good guide to creating accessible Word and PDF documents which you can download from the RSC NE e-Inclusion web site. The Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution which means you can repurpose the content to suit your needs.

Craig has also written a tutorial on how to make Daisy digital talking books using the free Save as Daisy plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 and Open Writer. You can read the tutorial at http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/e-inclusion/?p=1262.

eBooks have been around for some years now without making much impact but recently there has been a lot more buzz about them. There are a lot of interesting possibilities with eBooks for people with print disabilities but the main one is access to books: if accessible eBooks could be purchased direct from a publisher then we would no longer have to  contact the publisher to ask for a digital copy and wait while they find it, or rely on someone somewhere scanning the book into a digital format. For this to happen, we need accessible eBook readers and accessible eBooks.

The first eBook readers left a lot to be desired in terms of accessibilty, but the new Kindle devices (particularly the larger Kindle DX) looks more interesting. Amazon have been under pressure to improve the accessibility of the Kindle - for example the United States Justice Deptartment has agreed that three Universities will not buy or recommend the Kindle unless it is fully accessible.

On the new Kindle DX, it seems the text size can be up to about 20 point, and Kindle claim they are going to add a new font in the summer which will double this size (i.e. 40 point). Of course the Kindle can also read the text out using text-to-speech software: the voice is provided by Nuance and so it should be quite good (albeit American). A major limitation is that it can only read 'unprotected' eBooks, and most of the commercial books are protected to prevent them being copied. RNIB and others are lobbying for publishers to find a way to protect their interests and also make their books accessible, so we hope to see an improvement here.

The new Apple iPad also looks interesting because Apple says it can read out eBooks using 'VoiceOver', the iPad screen reader, and you can change the text size and also the font. We don't know yet if it will be able to read commercial eBooks, or if this function will be restricted, like the Kindle. To read more about the iPad accessibility features go to the iPad features web page on accessibility.

So it looks like things are moving fast in the world of accessible eBooks.

If you want to keep up to date with developments I recommend Denise Dwyer's Print for People blog. Denise is a Development Officer with RNIB and her blog is a really helpful up-to-date summary of accessibility developments in the publishing world.

Many pupils benefit from accessing worksheets and workbooks on a laptop or desktop computer. Instead of handwriting they can key in their answers or drag and drop words, symbols or images. They can also use spellcheckers, text-to-speech tools such as the free WordTalk and many other access tools.

But it can be frustrating for both pupil and teacher when the pupil accidentally – never on purpose – deletes or edits the question or other text or images. MS Word has a few net tricks that allow you to prepare worksheets or workbooks so that the pupil can enter text only into the answer boxes. The questions remain ‘read only’. Janice McCallum, of the Sensory Support Service South Ayrshire Council provided a handy guide: Making accessible worksheets and workbooks MS Word 2007. CALL Scotland prepared a companion version for those who use MS Word 2003: Making Accessible Worksheets and Workbooks MS Word 2003.

Another 54 books were added to the Books for All Scotland Database today.

There are 23 new books in PDF which have been produced by CALL Scotland. LTS funded the production of these books, which are scanned PDF copies of third and fourth year textbooks from various publishers including Heinemann, Leckie and Leckie, Hodder and Pulse. The books were originally produced for a pupil with physical disability and they have structure for easy navigation. They have been OCRd so that most of the text is readable with text-to-speech software, but some parts of books with very complex visual layouts are not accurate - the OCR process just doesn't work with squint text or low contrast text on coloured backgrounds.

There are also 31 new 'Classic' titles such as Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, Kidnapped and Oliver Twist in PDF and Microsoft Reader format. Most of these books were produced by the participants on the Books for All course in Stirling last term: thanks to Anne Beveridge at LTS who checked, amended and collated these titles.

The new books can be used by pupils with visual or physical impairment - pupils with other print disabilities should not use them (yet) because the CLA licence under which they are made does not yet cover other disabilites (but we're told it will, any minute now...).

Teachers can access the Books for All Scotland Database via the Finding Books page or by going direct to the Database itself. To log in to the Database and download books you need a Scran password (all teachers in Scotland have one - someone in your school or local authority will know it) or you can log in via Glow.

The Books for All programme is about learning resources in accessible, alternative formats for people who cannot access standard printed books.

Sometimes this is due to, for example, severe dyslexia, visual impairment, blindness or physical impairment. In these case it is self-evident that the reader can't read a paper book because they either can't see, can't hold the book and turn pages, or just can't read.

But there are also many children and young people who have problems with reading when the cause is less obvious. Maybe they have a language difficulty, or a visual-perceptual problem, or maybe English is not their native tongue.

Or maybe they have never been read to as a child, never been comfortable with print, and have not had enough practice to become a fluent reader. (I read somewhere that you need to practice reading for 5,000 hours to become fluent.)

In these cases, should we try and teach the pupil to read, or should we use, say, audio books or digital books that can be read out by the computer? If we persevere with teaching literacy, will the pupil get frustrated and fall behind in class because they cannot read independently? By introducing books in accessible formats maybe we can prevent this frustration, help the reader be more independent, and at least give experience of language and literature. Maybe if we can encourage pupils to read books in accessible formats it will help motivate and develop general literacy and actually help develop reading skills? Maybe the opposite is true: if we give books in accessible formats, will they ever learn to read standard print?

Or should we try to both teach reading and also provide accessible formats so we have the best of both worlds - access to the curriculum and also development of reading skills?

This is a long introduction to a short blog to say that Pearson Education have published some interesting case studies and research reports about their Rapid Reading intervention programme which they say is "an award-winning, Wave 3 reading intervention programme that's been proven to deliver more than twice the normal rate of progress." Of course, there are many programmes and methods which make similar claims (see Dr. Chris Singleton's comprehensive review of teaching methods Interventions for Dyslexia) but the Rapid Reading videos and reports are interesting and well worth a look.

(And if anyone has answers to the questions posed above we'd be really keen to hear them....)

Another opportunity to learn how to make Books for All!

Learning & Teaching Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Government, would like to invite you to send a representative from your local authority to attend Books for All CPD event at Stirling Management Centre.  This free CPD is a four day training course, developed and delivered by CALL Scotland and is aimed at practitioners who currently produce books in alternative formats (such as large and adapted print, digital books and audio), for pupils with print disabilities as a result of visual, physical or learning impairment.

The course information is detailed below:

• Day 1 & 2 – 10th & 11th February 2010
• Day 3 & 4 – 25th & 26th March 2010 

The venue for all training is Stirling Management Centre and overnight accommodation and refreshments (if required) will be paid for by the Books for All Database project.   

Some of the topics that will be covered at the training include:

• Sourcing accessible resources
• Scanning papers resources into digital format
• Making publisher PDFs accessible
• Making "intermediate" files
• Converting intermediate files to different alternative formats
• Copyright
  

If you are interested and would like someone from your authority to attend then please let Gayle Monteith at LTS know by Monday 25th January.  Please note that places are limited on this course and will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.

If you are unable to attend the training, you can join the books for all user group on Glow.  We have formed a user group of experienced practitioners who, as part of their practice, create and use these types of resources. The aim of the group is to share information, materials and practical strategies to support their use.

If you would like to know more about Books for All in general go to http://www.booksforall.org.uk/ and to find out more about the Books for All Database go to http://www.booksforallscotland.org.uk/.

Once you have confirmed your interest in this course, LTS will confirm if a place is available and send you a booking form for the training.

If you have any questions about the venue, funding or arrangements please contact Gayle Monteith at LTS. If you have any questions about the course content contact Paul Nisbet or Stuart Aitken at CALL.

A new version of FineReader has just been released and the basic OCR accuracy seems to be much better than the previous version 9 (which was actually much worse than version 8 - we carried on using 8 because 9 was so bad). Here's a screenshot of a PDF image that was recognised using FineReader 9:

As you can see (and also hear, if you are using a screen reader), the recognition is pretty poor. Try right-clicking on the image and reading the alt text to see how bad it is.

Here's the same PDF page, opened and recognised using FineReader 10:

Much better! I've not had time to explore FineReader 10 in detail, but the user interface also seems cleaner and more intuitive. So all in all if you're struggling with FineReader 9 it might be worth upgrading to version 10.

You can try a 15 day trial copy from Abbyy and buy the program for about £69 from suppliers like iANSYST.

Happy scanning!

WH Smith are selling eBooks half price until 15 January. There are over 100,000 available and so you can get your hands on say the Twilight series for £4 each (no thanks), Rebus novels by Ian Rankin (that's more like it) as well as books by the likes of Barack Obama or Jeremy Clarkson. 

Most of the eBooks are electronic publication (EPUB) format which can be read with a Sony Reader or an iPhone or on a computer using the free Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. ADE leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accessibility though:

1. Most of the commercial eBooks are copy-protected so you can't read them with text-to-speech software or a screen reader.
2. The maximum font size is depends on your font size and resolution, but I estimate it to be about 20 pt.
   
3. You can't change colour of text or background.
4. You can't change font or line spacing.
   
5. Keyboard navigation is very limited.

ADE is OK if you basicaly want to see the pages on screen and click a key or switch to turn the pages, but readers with visual impairment or dyslexia may struggle.

However, if you've not looked at an EPUB book, now's your chance to buyone at half price. You can also get some free eBooks (e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Dracula) from the Adobe web site library.

The eBook revolution could be really good news for readers who struggle with standard printed books, but only if the eBook readers and the eBook formats are accessible. Adobe is working on improving the accessibility of ADE (see: Adobe eBooks - Update on Accessibility Support ) and the latest version of EasyReader can open EPUBs, but it can't read them out with text-to-speech because the text is copy-protected. So we need EPUB to let text-to-speech programs get at the text to read it out, and eBook readers that are accessible. Persuading publishers to provide accessible formats might be difficult but making an accessible eBook reader should be easy given that Adobe already has one - Adobe Reader. With Adobe Reader you can magnify the text massively, reflow to fit the screen, change colours, and it even has basic text-to-speech.

The Audio Revision Project at Lochaber High School is a really good example of how learning resources can be provided in alternative formats. The project is a collaboration between Dyslexia Lochaber, who raised the funding and organised some volunteer narrators, and Lochaber High School. Revision materials (some produced by staff, some commercial publications) were recorded and made available as podcasts on the school web site and the end result of the project is a set of revision materials for Standard Grade and Higher courses for all the subjects offered by the school in audio format. Pupils can listen to the revision materials online or download them to their own computers or audio players. Have a look at the project site and listen to what's been recorded.