[Athen] McGrawHill connect and accesssibility

[via athen-list]

Hi Debee,

The sample PDF you sent was created by McGraw-Hill using Paper Port Capture,
which is a scanning program to convert printed documents to digital PDFs.

 

I can't tell what settings the user had when making the scan, but the
resulting PDF is indeed not accessible. Although tagged, it doesn't have the
correct tags and the text is an image wrapped up in various tags rather than
live, machine-readable - and accessible - text. McGraw-Hill missed the next
step, which is to OCR (optical character recognition) the digital graphic
file, and then correctly tag the resulting live text.

 

Technically, there's nothing preventing McGraw-Hill from making this fully
accessible. In my firm's dealings with them and other educational
publishers, we've found the corporate attitude is to either do the minimal
amount of work to make documents sort-of-accessible, or just ignore
accessibility entirely. 

 

We've trained many employees of several of the publishing houses and found
that our students eventually leave the companies for other jobs rather than
try to turn around the corporate culture

 

Such a sad outcome for people like you who need these documents to be fully
accessible. 

 

I think they need to hear directly from you about the barriers you
experience with their files. The creator of the digital file is listed in
the PDF's File / Document Properties (a.k.a. metadata). Possibly you can
contact her directly?

 

-Bevi Chagnon

 

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf
Of Deborah Armstrong via athen-list
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2025 3:28 PM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
<athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] McGrawHill connect and accesssibility

 

Attached is an inaccessible PDF and an OCR'D version of it that describes
accessibility for McGrawHill Connect lab textbooks with integrated
assignments.

As a screen reader user, I've taken several classes using these labs and
find them mostly accessible.

However, their guide is woefully out of date. Also it's plain silly that the
guide describing accessibility is itself not accessible!

If there's an accessibility consultant out there who wants to make some
extra money, contact this publisher and offer to update this document. They
really need to do it.

--Debee

 

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