Advisory Committee Meeting 10-01-14
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AccessText Advisory Meeting 10/1/2014
Activity Report
- 2014 Requests to date: 79,439
- Estimated to reach 94,000 by end of year.
Question: What percentage of request growth is from publishers who joined AccessText after it started? Analysis: 2.3% of requests made since 1/1/13 have been to the eight publishers who joined AccessText after 2009.
Publisher Update
Member publishers: 16
Question: Would it be helpful for member schools to send AccessText the names of publishers they work with? Reply: It would be more helpful for schools to tell publishers about AccessText (several publishers came to us this way). Action: Bob will prepare letter for schools to use to let publishers know about AccessText.
DSS Update
- Member schools: 2,198
- Number of schools making requests each semester varies around 1,500
Sponsor Update
- T-Base and Sonocent sponsorships expire this year
- Primary funding is provided by publishers. New sponsors are welcome
Conference Update
- AHEAD Conference in Sacramento a success
- No conference presentations planned for 2015
AMAC Update
- Georgia Tech/AMAC awarded 'First in the World' grant
- $3.8 million over 4 years
- Focused on developing market for accessible materials and on students with disabilities at minority serving institutions
- Bob will be working on new project and new AccessText staff will be needed
Roundtable
- Question about automated file transfer from publisher to ATN
ATN is working on a system that publishers can use to automate the storing of files on the ATN server for automated fulfillment. There is no timeline for this yet but it is now on the development agenda.
- Question about file names - can they be standardized?
This is the file naming convention used by one of the ATN member schools: Title_Author_Edition_ISBN Examples: Basic Elements of Landscape Architectural Design_Booth_9780881334784 Cosmic Perspective, The - Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology_Bennett_5th_9780321503206 • No Dashes for ISBN, 10 or 13 is fine, whichever one is available. Check Front Matter • If Edition not present or first edition, leave blank • For title with An and The, place in the back of title with comma • Volume number goes in title, may use abbr for Vol. • Use – instead of :
- Review work on accessibility at http://www.epubtest.org
We have made progress recruiting people to test reading systems that support EPUB 3, but we still need many more. We would like to pay for this work and are seeking funding. However, we currently do not have the funding and are asking volunteers for help. If you are associated with a university or other institution that will benefit from having reliable digital reading systems available for students with special needs, please participate and spend some time testing a reading system used on your campus or being considered for use. Ideally, a moderator will be identified for each reading system on a specific platform (OS) and that moderator will help other volunteers test and report findings using the Assistive Technology (AT) at their disposal. Example: Reading system HappyReader (fictional name) running on Windows 7 will have a moderator who manages volunteers to test HappyReader with the wide range of AT used on Windows 7. The screen reader JFW using TTS as output would be one evaluation performed; another volunteer evaluator would test HappyReader with NVDA using braille output; another tester would use screen magnification ZoomText and report the results, etc. Because of the wide range of AT used by persons with disabilities, a crowd source approach will be used. We encourage organizations to sponsor testing by assigning people to test the specific reading systems and technologies used in their organization. For example, a university using specific AT with specific reading systems will assign people to work on testing those systems and share their findings.