Listen to Show 63

This is part one of a three-part series on electronic texts with Daniel Berkowitz of DigiLife Media (www.digilifemedia.biz). In this first part, we talk about what eText is, different types, and accessibility of eText.

In Part 2, we will talk about legal issues you need to be aware of related to eText, and in Part 3, we'll talk about how to set up your own eText production and options for outsourcing if you decide not to do it yourself.

Dann is offering a great offer to Disability411 listeners. If you have materials you need to have converted into accessible eText, he will give you 10% off your first order with DigiLife Media. This offer is good through the end of 2009, so take a look at your needs for Fall and contact Dann to discuss your needs. Visit their website at www.digilifemedia.biz, email Dann at info@digilifemedia.biz or by phone at 978-914-4601.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS

Disability 411 Show #63

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Beth Case: Hello and welcome to the Disability411 Podcast, your podcast for disability information. I’m your host, Beth Case.

Today we have Part One of a three part series I did with Dann Berkowitz. Dann is an expert in electronic text and alternate text production. We did this in three parts because there was so much to cover that we just couldn’t do it in one.

Today we’re going to hear just sort of an introduction; what is electronic text, when do you want to use it, what kind of students with disabilities will benefit from it. Then in Part Two we’re going to talk about some of the legal issues you need to be aware of before you jump into this. And in Part Three we’ll talk about what you need to consider if you want to set up your own electronic text production lab and, if you don’t want to do it yourself, what are the resources available to you to have it outsourced who can help you get your books in an accessible format.

Now it’s kind of interesting because Dan and I did this interview a few weeks ago and since then there has been a lot of attention paid towards electronic text and text to speech and that sort of thing. If you listen to the last episode you know I’m involved with Reading Rights which you can read about at readingrights.com and that in a nutshell has to do largely motivated by the Amazon Kindle Two.

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader and when the second version came out it had the ability to read books out loud. Of course it’s using the computerized electronic voice, its not a human voice but what it allowed was people with print disabilities to be able to buy books from Amazon. Come on, let’s face it, they’re not completely altruistic, right? They can increase their sales by allowing this text to speech feature that people with print disabilities can now buy books, electronic books from Amazon for their Kindle and be able to listen to them.

Well, the Author's Guild and some of the publishers kind of had some issues with that because they felt that text to speech was a derivative works, that it would conflict with their rights to sell an audio version of their book. I really think that they just don’t understand that there is a huge difference between an audio book and text to speech. I mean, no matter how good the voices are in text to speech, and let’s face it, they’re getting pretty good, it’s not the same as a professionally produced audio book with professional actors.

Maybe I’m a little naive, maybe I’m a little Pollyanna, but I really think that if the Author's Guild could just understand that this is not a conflict, that text to speech is not the same as an audio book and instead of reducing the sales of their audio books, what they’re actually doing is increasing the sales of their electronic version because now all these people with print disabilities will be able to buy books.

Anyway, go over to readingrights.com, see what the issues are, sign the petition, help get the message across that really, this isn’t a bad thing for you financially, if you allow people to have text to speech versions of your book.

The other thing that’s related is, here in Texas, there’s a House Bill that’s gaining quite a bit of approval and is likely to pass, and it’s House Bill 4292, it’s being sponsored by Dan Branch. Basically what it says is that school districts can buy electronic textbooks instead of or in addition to the print versions of the textbooks. This has the potential to be really beneficial to students with disabilities, with print disabilities, because now they don’t have to go through extra steps, extra hoops to get their book in an accessible format. It’s universal design. Everybody has access to the electronic text.

The problem is, I haven’t heard any discussion about the fact that these electronic text versions will be accessible. Now, I’m going to be looking into this and trying to find out some more about it and whether there’s anything that says that these electronic texts have to be accessible, but as we’ll hear from Dan here in a few minutes, just because something is in electronic format or is an electronic text does not mean that it is usable or accessible to people with disabilities.

I think that’s a misconception in a lot of people’s minds. They think, “oh, it’s electronic text. That means people with disabilities will be able to have access to it” and clearly that’s not true. The Kindle situation is a perfect example. It’s electronic text, but someone who’s blind still can’t use it. So, anyway, it’s just sort of interesting that so much related to electronic text is sort of coming together right no.

So, let’s get into the interview with Dann and find out a little bit about what electronic text is.

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Beth: Dann, before we start, I just want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today and for being willing to share your vast wealth of knowledge with our listeners.

Dann Berkowitz. Thank you, Beth.

Beth: Before we get into the real meat of this interview, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been involved with e-text.

Dann: My name is is Dann Berkowitz. I’ve been in the professional field of serving the needs of students with disabilities at the post-secondary level since the mid- nineties when I got my start in graduate school at the University of Connecticut. I’ve worked at a couple of small private institutions and then I was very fortunate to find myself at Boston University where I was the Assistant Director in the Office of Disability Services for nearly eight years.

It was a fantastic place to be, great people, but a couple of years ago I had an opportunity to leave the professional field, if you will, to leave my full-time job and start my own business which is Digilife Media, www.digilifemedia.biz. What we do is we focus on e-text production and alternative formats as an outsource for colleges and universities, K-12, government, corporate, whoever needs the work done.

I also do some consulting, training, all of that sort of thing. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m recognized as a bit of an expert in the field. I’ve given presentations at conferences. People may have seen me speak at CSUN, AHEAD, the University of Connecticut Post-Secondary Disability Training Institute, around the Boston area, that sort of thing.

There are times when I don’t think I’m an expert, I just happen to have a lot of knowledge in a particular area that interests me. But I guess that makes me an expert.

Beth: You know the definition of an expert is simply someone who knows more about a topic than you do. I would say definitely in the disability community, your name is recognized as someone who knows a lot about electronic text and alternative printed format production. I’m thrilled to have you here.

Let’s start at the very, very beginning. What is e-text?

Dann: What is e-text? E-text is a very broad, a very broad name for many many different things. That can be confusing to folks because what one person considers to be e-text, another person might not or something that is digital in one form may or may not be e-text in another form. A good example is a PDF document, that seems to be a very basic one that a lot of people use.

PDF comes in many permutations. There are image PDFs, basically like a photograph. It’s not accessible in terms of what we in the professional field of disability services consider to be accessible. It’s just a picture on a computer screen. We can see it, but there’s not much you can do with it.

Beth: It’s kind of like taking a photograph of a page. If you can see, you can see the words in the photograph but it’s not digital text. You can’t edit it, you can’t do anything with it, right?

Dann: You can’t dig into it. You can’t manipulate it in any way. But that’s even a misnomer. Let’s say you have some visual impairment and you needed something blown up larger. If you’ve got a big enough computer monitor, nothing says you can’t take a PDF image file and make it 250% larger and suddenly you’re able to read it. In that sense, it could be accessible, but there are different permutations of PDF.

More and more we’re seeing PDFs that are accessible. They’re a screen reader or a text to speech program. You can actually dig into it and produce audio, it could be sound or read it out loud to you. Quite often, people will take a PDF document and run it through an optical character recognition, an OCR software program and spit out a Microsoft Word document or a rich text format document on the other end.

Now it’s much more complicated than that, but the beauty of digital text, anything that’s on a computer, is that if you have the right hardware, the right software, and the right know-how, you can pretty much convert anything from one format to another end format and different variations of it in between. There’s a lot that can be done in that.

The idea of e-text is so very broad that a lot people have a hard time wrapping their brains around it or they understand some parts of it very well but not other parts of it. Some folks have a tendency to focus in on one particular type of e-text and that’s how this thing is available and they tend to forget that there are other ways of doing things.

Beth: It almost sounds like, I know sometimes those of us in the disability field use a word a certain way when that word has a different meaning to the general public. I know, for example, when I think of e-text I immediately think of accessible text, but really it’s not that limited. It could be a Word document, it could be an email, it could be anything, right?

Dann: Exactly. Exactly right. If you can bring it up on a computer screen, it’s e-text. Even that’s sort of a misnomer because people instantly think, “well, look at the new Amazon Kindle or look at what I can pull up on my Blackberry or my Palm Pilot”. Is that e-text? It might be an eBook.

Again, these are the terms that I use: free text, e-book. Other people might use different terms or even different ways to spell them. I tend to write e-text as capital E, hyphen, lower case t-e-x-t (E-text). Other people spell it different ways.

Beth: I tend to do a little e, capital T, ext, all one word.

Dann: Exactly. Different people do it in different ways. But I’m saying e-books such as the Amazon Kindle or what you might get from the Palm store...

Beth: The Sony E-Reader. I have that one.

Dann: Very good. The Sony E-Reader is a good example. The differences tend to be more the semantics, they have to do with the misconception of our society as a whole, and I’m talking about our society as a whole, not specifically the disability service providers who, anyone listening to the show right now who works in the DSS office is probably going, “I get it, I get it. Let’s move on.”

Beth: Right, right.

Dann: But the misconceptions of society, how they consider individuals with disabilities connecting with the material. An e-book tends to be commercial based. The Amazon Kindle store, they’re going to sell these books and you gotta pay the authors and you gotta do all this sort of thing.

This is an academic base, which is what e-text tends to be. We’ve got a student who needs material so we’re going to chop the spine off the book, run it through a scanner and turn it into e-text.

E-books tend to be mass-produced. E-texts tend to be what we call a one-off, you do it for one student for one semester and then it goes into the server, never to be seen again. The e-book tends to be static or untouchable, it locks down, it’s proprietary, its commercial whereas e-text tends to be malleable. You can take one book, scan it, turn it into a digital format and then you can do many different things with it depending on the needs of the student. So there are differences between those two, as well.

How people use the term access can be viewed differently. I had a good example. A faculty member that I worked with who was a little confused about this. They were trying to figure out the best way to put their materials online and make the materials so that students in their course, not just students with disabilities but all of their students, could get their hands on the materials through the computer screen. I talked about access this and access that and etc etc. The faculty member just looked at me and said, “Why are you using Access? Why don’t you just use Microsoft Word?”

Beth: Oh, no!

Dann: We stared at each other for a moment and I realized that they heard the word access and their instant connection to the term was the Microsoft Access database program.

Beth: Oh, no!

Dann: Now that’s an extreme example, but there are people out there who are confused by what the terms means, so take a look at what the terms mean to you, but make sure that whatever they mean you you can easily describe to somebody else while talking to them.

I think that’s an important lesson to learn throughout the industry, if you will, of Disability Support Services at the post-secondary level is that within our professional field, we banter terms around all the time that faculty, staff, outside people, family, friends, K-12 institutions, don’t use the same terms.

Beth: Yes, we have our own jargon, vocabulary that may not be instantly understandable by someone not in our field. Yes, that happens a lot.

Dann: It happens in every professional field. Exactly.

Beth: Okay, so we have a general understanding of what e-text is. You said there are so many different kinds and some of them are accessible and some of them aren’t. What formats would we use in disability services? What are some of the more accessible formats?

Dann: Well, I think more importantly than what some of these formats are is how are they being used? The first question I think any disability services provider should ask their student when they’re developing a program or trying to determine an accommodation for a student, the first question usually is, “what are you, the student, leaving? What do you familiar with? What are you comfortable with?”

The student might say, “well, back in high school I used Kurzweil a lot” and BAM! That speaks volumes. You know right then that if they’re using Kurzweil, they’re probably familiar with the proprietary Kurzweil format, but more importantly, if they know how to use Kurzweil, in my experience I’ve found that a nice, clean rich text format document will work beautifully with Kurzweil. It’s cleaner, it’s faster, it uploads better.

Some people like to use PDF with Kurzweil. Some people like to use HTML with Kurzweil. I’ve found that RTF is the best.

Beth: Uh huh.

Dann: What’s RTF? Many people tell me that Rich Text Format is really sort of what Microsoft Word documents are based on. If you compare the stuff to maybe ice cream, that works. A Rich Text Format document might be a nice vanilla ice cream base...

Beth: Okay...

Dann: Microsoft Word adds the nuts and the caramel and other things to it and you’ve got a lot of stuff in there that might not appeal to everyone but can be yummier and prettier looking that the Rich Text Format document. RTF is pretty basic stuff because it maintains the formatting and it maintains the fonts and things like that, but it doesn’t include a lot of the flotsam and jetsam that Microsoft Word might throw in there.

If you ever tried to create a bullet point list within Microsoft Word document and found yourself frustrated that the software program wants to do it a certain way and you don’t...

Beth: Exactly.

Dann: You’ve experienced the rocky road of Microsoft Word that the software program thinks it knows better than you do.

Going back to the original question, the first question is to ask a student, “what are you using and when?” The student might say, “Well, I’ve got an iPod and back in high school I was able to get some books because they were classics and they were available through Audible.com. I like listening to it on my iPod and I read along at the same time.”

Great! You can very easily take a hard copy of an inaccessible digital file, run it through a process, an e-text production process, and produce MP3 files.

What else makes e-texts? Again, there can be so many different versions of it. Everyone knows .doc which is a doc format, that’s Microsoft Word, but also PowerPoint, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, PDF. There are a number of access technologies that have specific formats: .kes, .ark for Arkenstone, .brf (Braille), those sorts of things, some, web delivered formats, htm, html, xhtml, plain text which would be .txt or ASCII or .asc, almost plain text would be .rtf, etc etc.

You have to have a feel for what are some of these, but also know that pretty much anything out there can be reformatted into something else.

Beth: Wow, that’s a lot. That’s almost overwhelming for someone who’s not a geek.

Dann: What’s interesting is that listeners to the show, many of them will be scratching their heads going, “what in goodness name is he talking about?” and then there are people I know are listening right now and saying, “Dan, you left out so much it’s ridiculous.” I’m trying to find the middle ground in there.

Beth: Right. It sounds like it really is like everything else in our field. There’s no one size fits all and you have to take each student and what their needs are, what their past experience, what their knowledge is. What do they know how to use? If they already know how to use Kurzweil, then why train them on JAWS? If that’s something that works, leave it alone.

Dann: Exactly.

Beth: Now, most people, when they think about providing e-text to a student, they’re thinking about a blind student who’s not able to read their textbook. But that’s not the only disability that might really be helped by e-text. Can you touch on some of the other disabilities that might really benefit from this?

Dann: Certainly. In general, people who use e-text, students who use e-text can be any person, any individual who lacks the ability to interact with a traditional book in a traditional manner. By that I mean most people don’t even give this a second thought. You pick up a book, look through the pages, you have your eyes, you read, that’s understood as standard.

People who use e-texts can be many different things. Someone who lacks the ability to physically manipulate a book. You may have a student who is a wheelchair user, who is a quadriplegic who cannot physically move their arms. There are devices that can hold the book, turn pages, that kind of thing, but these days it might just be easier to get that book, scan it into a digital format and have it so the student can read it on their laptop they might have a attached to their wheelchair as they move around campus.

Individuals with a wide variety of learning disabilities: dyslexia is a big one, dysgraphia, whatever it happens to be. People who have a variety of learning disabilities or even attention deficit issues may have difficulty focusing in on the material, having it in an alternative format where it could be read out loud or read on a computer screen, it can be highlighted while it’s being read or what have you, that might be beneficial for students.

Individuals with cognitive issue may find an alternative formats or e-text to be beneficial. Obviously blind or visually impaired persons can find it very beneficial. Even students that are not traditionally recognized as having a disability, students who are not registered with the Office of Disabilities, can benefit from this work.

Beth: Dann, you talked about how useful it is to be able to hear what you wrote or to listen to your books and how e-text can be turned into text to speech and that sort of thing, but that kind of sounds like books on tape which has been around for a really long time, so why are we moving to e-text? What advantages does it have over books on tape? Why don’t we still just do books on tape like we’ve been doing for so long?

Dann: The technology has simply moved beyond audio tapes. E-text and digital versions of materials are replacing traditional books on tape. RFB&D is phasing out, or has phased out, cassettes. They’ve gone to their Audio Plus which is a DAISY format essentially.

E-text definitely provides greater options and greater opportunities for students. Something that’s e-text provides fuller curricular access for students. A single digital file can be used by a wide variety of text to speech and screen reader programs. A single digital file, depending on the format, can be a starting point for many other formats. You can also have specialized reader files and multiple end users can benefit from a single source.

If you have a book on a cassette tape, one person can use that at one time with one tape player. If you create a digital version of a book, even with something as simple as a Microsoft Word document and you suddenly have two, three, a half a dozen students all in the same course or a similar course are using the same textbook. Like any other Microsoft Word document, you simply make more copies of it and hand that out to students. You can have one source file that can be distributed to many other students.

E-text, depending on how it’s used by a software program or an end user, is much more malleable. It’s much easier to rewind. If you’ve ever tried to rewind or fast forward to find a particular spot in one of the old RFB&D cassettes tapes you know how difficult it can be. With e-texts it can be as simple as “search for” a particular keyword and find that keyword. If the digital document is paginated, you can even find the page you’re looking for.

DAISY talking books, in my opinion, are the ultimate for all of this. They’re searchable, you can have page numbering, you can change everything from the voice to the speed to how it looks on screen to how it sounds to a little bit of everything about it. They’re much more user friendly.

Beth: Well, Dann, that’s about all the time we have for Part One. In the next part of our series, we’re going to be talking about some of the legal issues that you have to be aware of. In Part Three we’ll actually get down to, okay, how do you do this. But we really wanted to give you some background because there’s stuff you have to be aware of before you just jump in feet first.

Dann, I understand that you have a special offer for our listeners. Do you want to share that with them?

Dann: Yes, I do. Thank you, Beth. Digilife Media, since I did leave the professional field to strike out on my own to start this company, we’d love your business and what we basically do is we can provide outsourcing, we can be your outsource for your e-text or we can help you set up, help colleges and universities and institutions set up their own e-text in-house production processes.

Knowing that a lot of people maybe are unfamiliar, or, I’ll be honest, uncomfortable with the idea of outsourcing materials, we want to make it as easy as possible so we are, Digilife Media is offering a ten percent discount for any new client for the entirety, on your first order with us, for the whole of 2009. I know that it’s springtime and a lot of people are thinking, well, I might not need your services until fall semester. So, even if you call us in September and you heard this earlier in the year and you need our services, ten percent off on your first order with us and give us a call. Give us a call or drop us an email or check our website. We would love to do work for you.

Beth: Do you want to give your website again and your phone number, your email, whatever contact information you want to share?

Dann: Our website is www.digilifemedia.biz Dot b-i-z. The .biz tends to throw people because it’s one of the more unusual ones. Our email address is info@digilifemedia.biz and of course, you can reach me by phone at 978-914-4601.

Beth: And if you didn’t have a pen handy to write all that down, of course, as always, this information will be in our Show Notes and I will have some information about the offer that Dan is offering for you all on the front page of the Disability 411 website which you should all know by now, disability-411.com so that later on, when you’re ready to try him out and submit an order and you can’t remember which episode we talked about this, the information will be on the front page. It’s a really great offer. Basically, guys, if you’ve got a student who needs their textbooks or materials in an alternate format, you don’t have an in-house alternate format production system, then you can send Dan the materials and he’ll work with you for what format the student needs them in and get it done for you. Very, very convenient.

Dann: Quick thing. One, I’ve been in the professional field so I speak your lingo.

Beth: (laughs) He knows what "access" means.

Dann: Yes, I’ve been there in the trenches, I know what it’s like, I’ll talk you off the ledge, I’ve done it for a number of our clients.

Also, a number of our clients use this as what we call overflow. You may have production capacity but you might be ready for fifty textbooks a semester and suddenly a new graduate student shows up who throws your numbers off and you say to yourself, “oh my goodness, how are we going to get all of this done?” We’ll gladly take your overflow.

We have a number of clients who love to throw the worst at us. “Oh, I suddenly have this eighteen hundred page law textbook. We’ll give it to Dann. He’ll do it.”

Beth: We’ll do the easy, Intro to English ones and we’ll give you the graduate level law books. Yeah, I love it!

Dann: There are some things that we can’t do. We’re not Braille experts, however we are part of, and I want to put a plug in for Ron Stewart and his consulting firm that he started altformatsolutions.com. We are a member of that consortium and if we are unable to so something, we will gladly hook you up with Ron or another member of the consortium that can do work for you. We’ve got a great relationship with other entities and individuals and companies out there. We won’t leave you in the lurch. We’ll do our best to find somebody that can do the work for you.

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Beth: Now you know why we split this into three shows. This is a little longer than usual , but I think there’s just so much good information that’s really timely. So, I will keep the closing very short. Just remember to check out our website, disability-411.com where you can listen to all of our past episodes, read the transcripts for this and all of our past episodes and find some good resources. So, until next time, I’m Beth Case with the Disability 411 Podcast.

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The Disability411 podcast is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial Share- Alike 3.0 United States license, which means you can share our podcast, you just can’t make any money off it. Visit our website at Disability-411.com to find show notes, past shows, and transcripts of all the episodes as well as useful links, blogs and much more. Email us at disability411@jinkle.com. Music by The Brobdingnagian Bards is used with permission.