[Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

[kerscher at montana.com]

Hello Deborah and All,

 

I have a bit more to add to Deborah's post.

 

First, we at Benetech and at other organizations worldwide are advocating to
publishers to make their titles Born accessible. In Europe, the European
Accessibility Act (EAA) requires that all digital publications are to be
fully accessible by June 2023. This is having a huge impact in the
publishing industry, and because many higher education publishers sell
throughout the world, we have reason to be optimistic.

 

The Global Certified Accessible (GCA) service run by Benetech/Bookshare is
having a huge impact today. The publishers who are GCA certified are
producing terrific titles that are Born Accessible. All the GCA approved
titles are also in the Bookshare collection, but right now they are hard to
identify if they are GCA approved, or just the run-of-the-mill contributions
from publishers. We will be exposing more metadata about this in the future.
I will post here when available.

 

All the titles that are GCA certified can also be found at the Benetech
Accessible eBookstore found at:

 

https://benetechaccessiblebooks.vitalsource.com/

 

Now for tips:

 

If you find a title in the bookstore above, they are also in the Bookshare
collection and will be top quality.

 

Secondly, when identifying titles for your use, look for the latest
copyright, because the publishers are improving their production workflow.

 

Personally, my approach is to download three or four of the latest
copyrighted titles in the EPUB 3 format in the area I am trying to learn.  I
then go through them and figure out which title is best. I delete the ones
that are inferior.

 

Finally, we have been advocating that professors look at the accessibility
metadata in the VitalSource and RedShelf bookstores and pick titles for the
courses that are accessible!

 

We are working hard to transform the publishing industry! Publishers should
be using the Accessibility Checker for EPUB (ACE by DAISY) and use the
Simple Manual Accessibility Reporting Tool (SMART) to improve the
accessibility of their titles.

 

So, join us in advocating for Born Accessible titles from all publishers.

 

Best

George

 

 

 

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf
Of Deborah Armstrong
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 1:58 PM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
<athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

 

I've been wanting to write this up for a while. There's been conversation on
the list about the errors in Bookshare books, and here's my take:

I became a Bookshare member in 2002; I was an early adopter and was
downloading books a month after the organization got started. As a service
that lets people share books they scanned, it worked great. Nobody expected
perfection. We were happy to jus have the book to read.

Books on their platform work great if you just want to read with speech or
Braille. But if you expect good formatting, reliable page markup - reliable
any markup in fact, forget it. The problem isn't necessarily with their
books but with the promise that you'll get the same experience as if you
could read the printed book. You won't!

Last year I was struggling to learn SQL. I'm still not very good at it. This
was mainly because the books had diagrams that weren't included in either
the PDFS I got from the publisher for my courses or the ones on Bookshare.
The publisher can decide not to include images. They want you after all to
buy the book. Or at least rent it. 

I ended up renting one of my textbooks so I could have all the images, even
though I'm blind. I can always get someone to describe an image if it's
actually in the book. (Even so I never really grasped the difference between
inner joins and outer joins.)

Bookshare is great for fiction, literature and essay-style nonfiction. I
like reading technical books in Braille and Bookshare makes that possible as
well. It's just not very useful for textbooks if you expect the printed
textbook experience. The publisher can give Bookshare the online version of
the book which is missing content. They can choose to exclude all or some of
the visual content. Or the book is scanned and therefore the formatting is
non-existent or inconsistent.

I love Bookshare but that's because my expectations are pretty low. 

--Debee

 

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