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.

Spoken Ink is a new web site offering downloadable audio short stories by authors such as Roald Dahl, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood "and a host of new and unknown talent." Most of the stories cost 99p to download and you can listen to them on your computer, MP3 player, mobile phone etc.

The latest edition of the Accessibility Action Group newsletter is well worth a read and shows how much is going on in the field of accessible formats. For example:

• new guidelines for publishers in how they should respond to requests for permission to adapt books or for digital versions of books;
• an update on the DCSF Accessible Textbook project in England;
• an update on the Right to Read Alliance eBook working group's  efforts to encourage accessible eBooks;
• news that Adobe plans to improve the accessibility of it's less-than-accessible Adobe Digital Editions software;
• the Publisher Lookup Awards for publishers who have been particularly helpful to print-disabled readers;
• new Pearson HTMLbooks - digital versions of (North American) textbooks for the same price as print copies - this is what we want from all publishers

and much more.

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.

Last week 26 teachers and educationalists from all over Scotland gathered at Stirling Management Centre for the second part of CALL's four day course on making learning materials in accessible formats - "Books for All". The course was funded by LTS and led by Paul Nisbet and Stuart Aitken of CALL Scotland. We covered topics like:

• 'intermediate files' from which accessible formats can be made quickly and easily;
• scanning books and hard copy resources into digital formats;
• interactive resources created using Textease, Clicker 5, PDF, The Grid and Mediator (thanks to Maudie Riley from Highland, Graeme Bruce from Aberdeenshire, Janet Mackie from Fife and Owen Dunn from North Lanarkshire for presenting at this session);
• recording audio resources.

The course seemed to be well received and we hope that those who attended will be able to use the skills and knowledge acquired to create more books and learning resources in accessible formats for print-disabled pupils. We hope to be able to offer more of these in-depth courses in 2010, as well as the shorter events that we run as part of our regular CPD programme in Edinburgh and on site in schools and local authorities.