ictsan

If you have created an accessible version of a book under copyright, the book should contain a copyright notice. Here’s the one we use;

Copyright Notice.

This book was first published by …………..  in …………. The copyright is held by ………….. …………..

This Large Print Book has been prepared within  <name of your authority>  Education Dept, under the “Copyright (Visually Impaired Persons) Act 2002 ”

It is for use only by persons defined under that act;

“Visually impaired person” means a person—

(a) who is blind;

(b) who has an impairment of visual function which cannot be improved, by the use of corrective lenses, to a level that would normally be acceptable for reading without a special level or kind of light;

(c) who is unable, through physical disability, to hold or manipulate a book; or

(d) who is unable, through physical disability, to focus or move his eyes to the extent that would normally be acceptable for reading.

The legislation can be found here;

Microsoft Word’s document format; .doc seems to be something a standard in the creating of accessible documents – large print books, DAISY Books and books in MS Reader format. I have just made a large print books of “The Great Gatsby” for a pupil and here’s how I did it.

I visited wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org and entered the title of book. At the bottom of the page there was a reference to Gutenbery Project Australia, where I could view the whole text. I went for the text version.

Tip 1 – I press CTRL + A the CTRL + C to copy the text onto the clipboard. Then I load up MS Word. In my new document. I do not just paste the text, I use Paste Special and paste just plain text. Any graphics caught up the selection just get stripped out before the text is pasted into your document. Usually if you copy and paste froma webpage, Word copies the underlying html web code as well!

Tip 2 - Make sure that you have continuous text, not text with a line freed (LF) or carriage return (CR) at the end of a line. You can check by clicking on the show/hide paragraph symbol tool. It’s a backwards P. If this shows you a paragraph symbol at the end of each line, then you need to get rid of them – unless this work is in verse format. You need to know that the paragraph symbol is represented within Word by “^p” (caret, lower case p). So you could  search for “^p” and replace it with a space. Except then you’d have no paragraphs at all! So I replace two paragraphs (”^p^p”) with an unusual symbol say “~” tilde. I then replace the remaining single paragraphs with a space. I reinstate the tildes (”~”) with two paragraphs – “^p^p”. This is long winded but it works. If there is an easier way I’d love to know.

Tip 3 If you are making a large print book control the margins by going to the menu; File-> Page Setup-> Margins.
Reduce the upper and lover margins to as little as .5 cm and the left and right ones to 1.5 cm or less if your method of binding can take it. You should reduce the number of pages in the book quite substantially

Tip 4 Use Styles for the fonts; Choose your font size for this work. Do not, however mark the whole text and then change the font size in the menu at the top of the screen. This is a big mistake and nearly eveyone does it it because so few people have been shown how to use styles.

You need to use the Format -> Styles and Formatting tool. This appears at the right of your document. If you have pasted in plain text, then you should see just a few styles there including; Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2. You need to click on Normal – the style for the main body of the text and Modify the style. Change its format; change font size to say 20 pt Tahoma.

Now Modify the style – Heading 2 to say Arial Bold 20 pt. Modify Heading 1 to, say, Arial Bold 24pt

Find each chapter heading, click in the text – Chapter 1- and click on the style at the right; Heading 2.  You can find each occurence of the word chapter – usually at the start of a chapter and make sure that it is set to Heading 2.

Set the Title of the book to Heading 1.

If you use styles like this, you can easily change the whole of the body text size for a pupil who requires a larger size, by going back and Modifying the font size. There is another advantage. It is very easy to create an index called a table of contents. I’m running out of time to explain this, but here’s a clue.

Tip 5 After setting the section and chaper headings – using Headings 1, 2 and 3, use the menu item; insert-> Reference-> Index and tables…..> Table of contents. It usally enough to click on OK and you have an Index! If you change the font size or other formatting, this index will be out of date and you’ll have to renew it.

If you want to create an e-book to be read by a  person with access difficulties using MS Reader, you have done most of the hard work already.

This is how I do it and I think that using thiese methods will save time in the future if the docu,mets need to be used by other pupils in a slightly differnt format. If I have made any errors, please let me know.

Tip 6 Oh, do not forget to add your copyright notice to the new accessible book – more on this in a later post

Producing accessible versions of novels to be used by V.I. pupils who need large print or disabled pupils who cannot turn the the pages, is a task that many support staff are involved in. Where a classic text is needed, it can usually be found at the project Gutenberg; http://www.gutenberg.org/

Librivox is a project that aims to make all out of copyright works available as audio books. The readers are volunteers. The quality can vary from near professional to a little hard to follow. Some books have a single reader while others have readers taking several chapters each.

I have listened with pleasure to; the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle; the frontier novels of Jack London; the witty anecdotes of P.G. Woodhouse and the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells. These are all on my personal mp3 player. A pupil with significant visual difficulties needs to read “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells over the summer. What luck, it’s there at Librivox waiting to de downloaded. http://www.librivox.org

The quality of the reading is excellent. You could not wish for a better reader. He makes a couple of slips, but nothing annoying. If you want to try Librivox, start with this science fiction classic. The other early master of the genre, Jules Verne, is well represented. Some of his books are available in French, e.g. “Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Le”

It has been clear for a while that mp3 players would be excellent devices for the visually impaired. However, many have very small displays that make them unusable by VI users. This new device is a lot more than just an mp3 player. However it is most notable for being on of the few devices of its kind with voice output to allow navigation. It has no screen and all the commands are entered via key presses. The results are heard as spoken prompts.

This is a a very impressive solution in the school setting, to the problem of delivering learning materials in audio format to pupils in a portable format. Its size is just larger than a large mp3 player or mobile phone.

It can read out text or play files in a variety of formats;

• Talking Books – These are DAISY books, which usually have audio recording of text.
• Other Books – These are mp3 files. a series of files in a folder are treated as a book of sequential sections or chapters. This would be the folder to put a text book that had been turned into audio using a voice such as Heather – see previous post.
• Textfiles – plain .txt files and webpages can be stored here, to be read out by the internal voice of the Stream
• Music – Your music mp3s go here
• Notes – You can record voice notes, or lectures using the internal mike or an external one. They are stored here.

The Stream uses standard SD cards as a storage medium. These are cheap and the contents can easily be backed up onto a spare SD card.

Generally the means of navigation has been well thought out. There are faults. The folder structure of the text files “Bookshelf” is not reflected in the navigation system. This has been pointed out to the developers and it is believed that an improvement will be implemented soon. Fortunately, upgrades are made available at no cost from the developer’s website.

The internal voice which reads the static commands is excellent. However the voice that read the filenames and the text files themselves is not as clear and requires greater concentration. A UK voice is available from the website, but it is not recommended that users upgrade to this unless a new clearer version becomes available

One last gripe; It is hard to get to grips with a whole new operating system on a device with no screen. Sighted people are not used to it. the documentation does not really live up to the ideal of providing “What you need to know in the order you need it”

At last a really good implementation of MP3 player technology well designed for VI users. Also specialist technology for VI users that is not very expensive. Early adopters are not penalised as upgrades are free and simple to effect.

A word of advice if you are supporting a young user of the Steam. Take it home for a week and use it as your Mp3 player, means of accessing podcasts and listening to blogs. It works!

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Thanks to the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University, I have been able to use the newly licensed Scottish voice Heather. I have used it to create audio versions of text files. These have been prepared for a VI pupil who will listening to them using a Victor Reader Stream which will be the subject of a blog very soon, I hope.

Heather really is one of the clearest synthesised voices I have heard on a computer. She is a SAPI 5 voice and I have used the voice very well using Penfriend V 3.1 and Wordtalk, the free text to speech utility for MS Word. I also used a trial version of Wordtalk (v4.0) which turns marked text into a .wav or .mp3 audio file.

Here is a file of a short text that I made using WordTalk (4.0) I think sounds as good or better than any text to speech I have heard. – Wax in a candle. I improved the clarity by putting commas into longer sentences.

The text is taken from here http://wwr.wikispaces.com/Materials

Of course, the great thing is that the voice is definitely Scottish. She can manage Scottish place names rather well. Send me some text for Heather to roll her tongue round. Paste it into a comment!

For pupils needing a high amount of magnification, Supernova is one solution. It now comes as a pendrive.

The pendrive can be inserted into any Windows XP computer. Some modules are installed and Supernova is available on the computer. With networks it’s all a lot more complicated!

Supernova has a large number of facilities. In reality most users only use six or seven. They use these through the use of shortcuts. It’s sometimes necessary to change the shortcuts – especially if you are using a laptop. Also it is necessary to disable or change a shortcut because it might clash with the shortcut used by MS Word – such as CTRL+A to select all the text in a document.

Actually, this is the hard bit;  disabling the key press combinations to allow the desired shortcuts of MS Word to be available  to the user. The good news, is that you should only ever have to do it once.

Take a backup of the pen. Make extra backups. You can copy the settings to a new pen by doing the following;

Here’s a document showing how we set up the keyboard shortcuts

Hot_Keys-Word+Supernova _Magnification

The life of visually impaired people has been improved by the use of new development in assistive technolgy over the years;

Improvement in the visual appearance of the computer screen and items on it can include;
- changing the accessibility options in the operating system
- changing the font size in documents
- using an alternative browser like Opera or Firefox to give better access to font and image maginfication
- using screen magnification software

Speech output can be added to documents using; WordTalk for MS Word; Screenreading software; utilities like Texthelp or Penfriend

Stand alone devices for the visually impaired
Two main types of hardware fall into this category; Scanner/readers and CCTVs. Actually CCTVs are not really closed circuit televisions any more, but people still call them by this name. Essentially they are cameras which output to a acreen to allow users access to a larger image of; something close to such as a book. Something further away like a whiteboard or work display.

Accessing the computer
VI users benefit from learning to touch type. Some standard software for this purpose are no use to VI users.
They also benefit from being taught to use keyboard shortcuts to computer operations in place of mouse clicks. There is a short list of the most useful shortcuts;
www.educationict.org.uk/ictsan/resources/keyboard-shortcuts.pdf

Access to the Curriculum
Large Print Books
There is a greater emphasis now on making the curriculum more accessible rather than providing tools to improve things for VI pupils.
If schools cannot but a book in large print format, they have the right under UK copyright legislation to create an accessible version of a book for a pupil (VIP Copyright Legislation 2002).

DAISY books
A book can also be made into a talking book. Of particular interest to VI users are DAISY books ( Digital Accessible Information Systems). These books can be listened to on dedicated DAISY players (adapted CD/MP3 players) or else on a computer with DAISY reader software installed.

For some examples of assistive technology and immaginitive use of ICT see the photogallery; www.flickr.com/photos/ictsan/sets

The ScannaR is a very useful equipment for visually impaired people. It scans a page of a book, turns it electronic text and reads it out. It is in fact a computer with no screen or keyboard running a sophisticated piece of software.
The documentation that comes with ScannaR is thorough, but it does not present the functions of the equipment in the order that a user is likley to need it. The documentation created by Jo King is an exemplary piece of work in the way that it explains the way to use the Scannar.
Download it from here;

It is possible to carry out almost any operation on a Windows computer without using a mouse. However, these operations are rarely taught in school. It is far easier to teach the mouse clicks and menus that are required. However certain users are likely to benefit from being taught the keyboard shortcuts as standard.

These include visually impaired users who probably cannot see the pull down menus well, if at all. Also some users with fine motor difficulties find it easier to control the computer through the keyboard.
Here is a guide to some of the more useful shortcuts.
Here is one created for visually impaired users.
For all users, an operation like cut and paste can be carried out more swiftly.
Ctrl+C – Copy to Clipboard
Ctrl+V – Paste from Clipboard