[Athen] Fwd: FYI -- Access to Course Materials

[Laurie Vasquez]

In Settlement With Disabilities Group, Berkeley Will Improve Access to
Course Materials

May 8, 2013, 3:52 pm

By Jake New <http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/author/jnew>

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   - Comments (6)<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-settlement-with-disabilities-group-berkeley-will-improve-access-to-course-materials/43727#disqus_thread>

The University of California at Berkeley has reached a settlement with
Disability Rights Advocates in what the group is calling a“landmark
agreement”<http://www.dralegal.org/pressroom/press-releases/landmark-agreement-big-step-forward-for-students-with-print-disabilities>
to
improve access to textbooks, course readers, and library materials for
students with print-related disabilities.

Disability Rights Advocates represented three Berkeley students who said
they had difficulty getting access to the materials they needed for class.
The group, which is a nonprofit disability-rights legal center, approached
the university last year on behalf of the students, proposing settlement
negotiations<http://dralegal.org/sites/dralegal.org/files/casefiles/settlement-ucb.pdf>
that
could resolve the issues and avoid a lawsuit. The negotiations, which took
more than a year, led to several new accommodations, said Paul Hippolitus,
director of the university’s Disabled Students Program, who called them
overdue.

Over the past four years, the program struggled to keep up with a
115-percent increase in the number of textbooks it had to recreate in
digital text, Braille, or audio form, Mr. Hippolitus said. Last semester
the university created 750 such new versions.

“We had an old model that was not serving us well in this increase of
quantity and quality,” Mr. Hippolitus said.

Under the new system, the staff that is dedicated to producing the
alternative media will grow from three to five. Until this year, it had
been a staff of one, Mr. Hippolitus said. The staff will also be moved to a
larger space with new equipment. The new technology and employees will
allow the program to offer more support for students and professors,
helping answer students’ questions and lobbying faculty members to provide
students with advance notice of what reading materials they will require.

The program hadn’t previously been able to offer those services, as the
staff had been so busy just producing the materials the students needed,
Mr. Hippolitus said.

“We didn’t have the time to attend to those niceties,” he said. “They are
really important, but we didn’t have time while getting the books out.”

Additionally, the settlement requires the university to offer alerts and
reminders to students to submit what they need in advance of a semester.
The students will then get alternative versions of textbooks within 10
business days of a request and alternative course readers within 17
business days. If the wait is too long, students will be able to use
self-scanning stations to produce their own materials.

Mr. Hippolitus said the university was not sure how much the new services
would cost other than the extra $120,000 in salaries for the program’s new
staff members.

The new system will also provide greater access to books in the
university’s library. The program will inform the library which students at
Berkeley—there are about 70—require the alternative media, and library
staff members will scan books for those students using a new $20,000
scanner, Mr. Hippolitus said. The machine is different from the equipment
used by Mr. Hippolitus’s program, as it leaves through pages, rather than
requiring them to be cut out.

“Prior to the agreement, there was no real, defined process how to create
alternative media for library holdings,” Mr. Hippolitus said. “It was kind
of a black hole. Now there’s a clarity and a process to support that.”

As students and instructors have increasing access to more media at a
quicker pace, the need for improved methods of producing alternatives also
grows. At the same time, the number of college students with disabilities
is increasing. According to a 2009 report by the U.S. Government
Accountability Office, 11 percent of
undergraduates<http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d1033.pdf> have
a disability, with most of those students having learning disabilities.

Mr. Hippolitus said universities’ systems must expand and evolve to meet
those new challenges for students with disabilities.

“The broad concern is that alternative media across the country is lagging
behind, and more and better systems can be created,” he said. “If this is
one, we’re happy to make that contribution. If it just stimulates ideas
betters than ours, then terrific. We want to know about those ideas. But
either way, it gets the conversation started about alternative media.”
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