[Athen] New e-reader for Cengage Brain and Cengage Unlimited users

[Deborah Armstrong]

https://blog.vitalsource.com/update-for-users
This is from the VitalSource blog. Apparently Cengage is pulling many of their textbooks off VitalSource and their new home will be an internal e-reader.

My experience with students is even when an e-reader is fairly accessible, the students want to stick with a tool they know, whether it's their Kindle, Balabolka, K3000 or Read and Write.

I'm guessing that Cengage, like Pearson is going to "certify" more and more of their content as accessible  and encourage students to buy  a textbook in the e-reader.

I have some experience with Cengage Brain, and  on the positive side, there seems to be a "read aloud" button on every page so you can use the voice built in to your OS to listen to that page, as long as your browser and OS supports that. There also seems to be captioning on most of the videos for the two courses with which I have experience.

On the negative side, a book that has charts, tables and similar visual content may or may not have descriptions, and even when descriptions exist, if the image is just a picture of text - such as a picture of a spreadsheet or computer screen, the description won't contain the actual text.

--Debee
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