[Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

[Monica Olsson]

Thanks for sharing, Josh! Am I correct in hearing that your team helped develop this tool for LibreText? That's cool!

I wish that Pressbooks was able to figure out how to include an accessibility checker inside their platform, but as of my meeting today with a Product Manager, no such luck. It has to do with their company's decision to stay on Pressbooks TinyMCE instead of Gutenberg, ironically, for accessibility reasons.



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Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers)

Policy Associate – Accessible IT Coordinator

Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

•Email: molsson at sbctc.edu<mailto:molsson at sbctc.edu> • Phone: 360-704-3922



The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

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From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> on behalf of Joshua Hori <jhori at ucdavis.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2023 5:03 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [SPAM] Re: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

[Sent from outside SBCTC]


I’ve been trying to address exactly this issue with Libretext OER textbooks and we’ve created a tool that’s similar to Pope Tech.



https://blog.libretexts.org/2022/09/26/checking-in-with-libretexts-accessibility-checker/



If Benetech/Bookshare is interested, 2 of my student programmers are graduating this year.



Best,



~ Joshua



From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> on behalf of foreigntype at gmail.com <foreigntype at gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 4:36 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Athen] My opinion on Bookshare

To add an additional push to George's post, encouraging professors on our own campuses to search for and select the Born Accessible textbook titles is always a good idea. I would add, having been a professor for many years, few of us are permitted to pick our own textbooks. This adoption of curriculum comes from the department chairs, so let's aim some PR to university department chairs and those responsible for adopting textbooks and curricula. Another department worthy of our efforts in proselytizing Born Accessible curricula is course development and/or the faculty development departments. Recommendations from these departments also carry a lot of weight in this area.



My thoughts.



Wink

Wink Harner

Accessibility Consultant/Alternative Text Production

The Foreign Type

Portland OR
foreigntype at gmail.com<mailto:foreigntype at gmail.com>
480-984-0034

This email was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Please forgive quirks, misrecognitions, or errata .





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On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 4:13 PM <kerscher at montana.com<mailto:kerscher at montana.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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<mailto: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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