[Athen] Alternatives to Read&Write

[Susan Kelmer]

We are a Kurzweil campus, and costs are a little less than TextHelp, I think.  Of course we have WAY more seats than we need, which continues to be a bone of contention with me regarding both KZ and R&W.  We don't need a license for every student on campus.  We need licenses for less than 150 students on our campus.  Our campus population is ~36K.  Both of these companies need to listen to us in higher ed - we are not K-12.

Anyway, Kurzweil will handle PDFs and Word files, even TIFF and Jpegs.  It will handle epubs but not well, unfortunately.  I usually turn ePubs into something else.  Kurzweil has a plug-in for Chrome (and other browsers) but it won't read everything. The Kurzweil web-based portal will read most things, but again, ePubs are going to be a problem.  You would likely be cobbling together some Frankenstein mess of apps to cover every need, unfortunately. As "born accessible" as ePubs are touted to be, they really aren't until the TTS software catches up and reads them properly.

I don't dislike Kurzweil, but I wish it read math, and handle ePubs well, and give us better navigation with large PDFs, rather than us having to break them into chapters before sending them to the student.


Susan Kelmer
Alternate Format Production Program Manager
Disability Services
Division of Student Affairs
T 303 735 4836
www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices<http://www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices>


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From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Jeremy Zhe-Heimerman
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2022 6:36 AM
To: athen-list at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Athen] Alternatives to Read&Write

Hi folks,

Our IT people had difficulty negotiating a new contract for Read&Write with Texthelp this year, mainly because of increased costs, but possibly because of terms and conditions too. I'm now looking at alternatives in case we need something more cost effective.

We used Kurzweil 3000 before we moved to R&W 7 or 8 years ago. Any improvements there? I'm looking at Capti and Speechify as possible alternatives. Has anyone tried them or another alternative?

I'm hoping to find something that can

  *   be deployed to students in all operating systems, including mobile;
  *   read PDFs and epubs, including Bookshare files;
  *   be used in our testing center with PDF and Word files;
  *   earn extra points for integrating nicely with Microsoft 365.

Thanks for any knowledge you may have to share!

Jeremy Zhe-Heimerman (he, him, his)
Assistant Director, Disability Resources
SUNY Cortland
Memorial Library, Room B-204
P.O. Box 2000
Cortland, NY 13045-0900
O: 607-753-2358 | F: 607-753-5495
jeremy.zhe-heimerman at cortland.edu<mailto:jeremy.zhe-heimerman at cortland.edu>
Test Administration Scheduling System<https://webapp.cortland.edu/TASRequestForm/> | Disability Resources Homepage<http://www2.cortland.edu/offices/disability-resources/index.dot>
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