Thread:Pamster315/@comment-26224233-20170518024210/@comment-26224233-20170729210824

I work for a local community college. After the student purchases/rents the textbook, all costs are borne by the participating educational institutions. We belong to a consortium of high-ed and publishers that is run out of University of Georgia. The publishers send us their files through the consortium and we convert them into the prefered accessible format. They usually send us PDFs. We can convert books into Kurzweil, DAISY, true large print, mp3, and braille formats. We have never done braille because none of our students read it, nor are any of us experts in braille. If we did get a student who needed braile, we have to contract it out.

Kurzweil is the best format for students who can see the page, but not access the printed text. The student actually sees the page as it appears in the book. Kurzweil then reads the text to them, highlighting chunks of text in one color and the word currently being read in another color. This makes it great for students with tracking issues. Beginning readers also find this feature helpful because the student can associated the word with how is sounds.

There is so much information about the text that is transmitted by the layout of the page, so it is very helpful that Kurzweil maintains the page image. In addition, you can set Kurzweil to read just the primary text and the call-outs, tables and picture captions only when the student clicks on them. DAISY is the international standard for accessible text, but it not as nice as Kurzweil because it strips the page layout and presents the book in a single stream. Neither format uses "computer" voices--the voices now sound more natural.

Hopefully, I didn't overload you too much.