[Athen] How to contact Bookshare about quality of files

[Susan Kelmer]

Hello and happy longest shortest week of the year.  At least, that's what it feels like.

What is the best method to contact Bookshare about the quality of files?

I've just encountered a monstrously inaccessible set of files in a "born accessible" Bookshare file.  There are three pages of tables in one chapter that have been placed in the document as images, and my only recourse is to retype these by hand because they are too small and fuzzy to run through OCR (I already tried). If I'd had the original PDF to run through Omnipage, those tables would have rendered out to .txt with no issues, and would have taken three clicks in Word to turn into an accessible table from that OCR result.

I feel that if publishers who have been convinced to only share their files with us through Bookshare knew how horrible the quality is, they'd rethink not giving us PDFs.  A PDF gives me renderable, accessible text from my normal remediation processes, something I've been doing for many years.  I spend so many hours on "fixing" Bookshare files, and it is such a time suck.  I can convert a PDF to accessible Word or HTML in half or less as much time as it takes to "fix" a botched up Bookshare file.

Anyone have a good contact I can email with these concerns, and especially how to report the issues with the current file I am working on? I have not had luck contacting anyone there to get anything fixed.  If I could have the original PDF, I'd have already fixed those tables and moved on, but now I'm looking at hours of typing.

Susan Kelmer
Alternate Format Production Program Manager
Disability Services
Health and Wellness Services
T 303 735 4836
www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices<http://www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices>


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