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!

Lots of teachers, pupils and parents are interested in scanning books into the computer, converting it readable text, so that for example:

• pupils with physical disabilities can press a key on the keyboard, or click a switch, to turn the pages, or
• dyslexic pupils can have the text read out with text-to-speech software, or
• pupils with sight loss can use text-to-speech software or magnify the text to read the book.

There’s a good article by Jim Kauppila on making digital files from printed materials in the latest issue of Closing the Gap. Jim's project has scanned hundreds of books and thousands of pages and in the process has gathered a lot of experience. You can read the article by signing up for a 14 day trial of Closing the Gap. Jim advocates a similar process to the one that we covered in the recent Books for All courses at Stirling, which involves:

1. Scanning the book
2. Converting the scanned image to text using FineReader Pro optical character recognition (OCR)
3. Checking and editing the text with FineReader Pro.
4. Saving from FineReader as PDF (which makes a digital book that looks like the original) and Plain Text or RTF (for further editing in Word, say, if you want for example a Large Print copy)
5. Saving from RTF/Plain text/Word as MP3 audio.
6. Adding structure to the PDF with Acrobat Pro.

The nice thing about this workflow model is that it generates several different types of accessible format for lots of pupils with different literacy support needs.