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Load2learn – making curriculum materials accessible.
Hello, I'm E.A. Draffan and I've worked for many years with accessible technologies and
in particular with those who have dyslexia and visual impairments or print impairments
as we may call them nowadays. But I've also worked in schools and universities over the
years and I've been looking at the hardware used for reading recently and it's expanded
enormously. We now have e-readers, tablets and even reading from our phones which we
never have done a few years ago. One of the problems is making decisions, making
choices, deciding whether an e-reader versus a tablet is better for your student and in
which situation you're going to use that tablet or e-reader. And then you have to actually
consider whether one choice of tablet will do everything and there's been a lot of convergence,
as that's the time they tend to use, with these sorts of devices.
But still in schools we know our students are using I-pods. We know they're using their
mobile phones but not necessarily for reading. We also know that our laptops are still being
used as one of the main ways of providing digital texts.
The hardware for e-readers has yet to be tried and tested in libraries but it's beginning
to appear in some schools and universities. And this particular piece of research has
shown that it's going to expand enormously by the year 2016.
If you're thinking, making decisions, making choices think size as much as anything else.
If you've tried to read from an I-pad for any length of time you'll know that that 680
grams can feel mighty heavy after a while and you'll know that your mobile phone is
never far from your hand and rarely feels heavy. But that Kindle or Sony reader which
is 6 to 7 inches is actually quite an ideal weight and can slip into a bag very easily.
So, we need to think size. We do need to think about what goes on an
e-reader and then we need to think about how this experience is going to impact on our
reading. Most e-readers only have one type of reading experience. It's black on a grey-white
background. It tends to be with three or four font sizes and it tends to offer, sometimes,
different font styles. But that experience is of a book coming down with several pages
that you can then turn very easily with the press of a button or the swipe of a finger.
Most of the touch e-readers are not as easy to use as the touch tablets. But there are
a huge variety of tablets and more coming on to the market now with Windows entering
the fray. We have our Androids, IOS and even some Linux types. So we're looking at this
enormous array of seven to ten inch tablets which have got very different reading experiences
depending on the applications that you've downloaded to read your books.
The problem about that is that we haven’t really evaluated them very seriously yet.
So, we have a collection from I-books to stanza to particular ones that have been made especially
to take the Daisy format such as Boblight, Blio. But even those don't necessarily have
all the attributes that you want. For instance there's many a time when the text to speech
won't work and you can't understand why. It can be due to copyright. It can be due to
the format. But often you are left wondering why this wonderful application that you have,
that has lots of accessibility features isn't making the most of them.
So, what about the thing that you're looking at? What makes a comfortable reading experience?
Well, the research is beginning to show that e-ink, in particular, that which is found
on an e-reader, such as the Sony, the Kindle, the Kobo, the Nook, that is much comfortable
on the eyes; it doesn’t glare as much. Also it doesn’t use the battery as quickly as
the I-pad or other LCD screens, which have high resolution and a brilliant way of watching
videos. So, they offer the flexibility that you might
not get on an e-reader but be aware your battery is not going to last the two weeks that your
Kindle battery may last. It may last eight hours, not guaranteed to be a good experience
if you're on a long train journey. And if you're watching a lot of videos it's even
worse. This is something that a lot of the augmentative communication device people have
had to think about because their students are not only using their tablets for reading;
they're also using them for speaking. This can have a huge impact on them.
So, there is a website that has actually done some interesting comparisons and this is a
very small page. So we've chopped up the pages for you and you've got red blobs. The red
blobs, circles are where there is the most suitability, according to this sort of research.
But we're debating some of these and, of course, it's going to change over time.
So, if you looking at battery life they're saying that the e-reader is the best and I
think on most occasions that's probably right. You probably couldn’t read that long on
your laptop or your tablet or even your smartphone. But there is a downside when it comes to the
pictures that your student might wish to see in their book and there's no two ways about
it the e-reader does not give a good experience with pictures. And that's a worry, in particular
if you want colour because the e-reader tends to use black on white or reverse colours.
One of the loveliest things about the tablet and the laptop of course is that books can
become interactive and your e-book that becomes interactive can offer a multi-modal experience
and sometimes for some children that can be amazingly helpful, in particular if you're
looking at science subjects and you want to, perhaps, see a chemistry experiment as well
as read about it. Display sizes have a huge impact and in fact
reading speeds can also be affected by the amount of text that you can see and read.
So, your laptop and your e-reader although they may appear to be the best very often
the tablet will also give you a good experience. Readability; now that's a debatable topic.
What is readability? It can be about content. In this case it's about the sort of experience
you're having with the contrast levels and with, perhaps, the glare, the dim, the type
of screen you're using. So, think about that in terms of the feel of your reading rather
than actually the content. Colors; you'll notice it's spelt with an "ors".
It's an American programme this one or American website. What do we need to say about colour?
Well, e-readers are coming into colour. We don't want to think about the fact that this
research may be a little dodgy but I have to say I have actually found some e-readers
with colour and they're not very clear. They're nothing like as good as the high resolution
tablets. So the researchers will be correct about that.
The other problem is with the variety of formats where they've given a sort of half-hatch for
your e-reader I feel that the e-reader really does limit the amount of formats you can have.
You're looking at your basic ones like pdfs and mobi and e-pub. You're not looking at
the video that can help you. You’re not looking so much at the different navigable
texts such as e-pub3 or daisy. So you have got problems there from the accessibility
point of view. Weight; well, we know there are issues there.
We’ve already discussed that and, I have to say some of the laptops that I've seen
recently, the little Toshibas, very thin, little Dells, very thin. No CDs in them or
anything like that but they are just as portable as your tablet, in some cases as your e-reader
and certain Mac technologies that have got so thin now that they could well be tablets.
Mobile connectivity; well, they've got a blank for the e-reader here but we know that they
can do wifi, we know that the Amazon Kindle excels in the one-stop download of their books
and the Sony as well. So, I don't think that little circle should be blank. But the other
problem we have is that the tablet very often negotiates a very difficult type of connectivity
and if you've got a mobile phone and a tablet as you well know there's double the cost and
that actually is an issue. So we need to be looking at the gateways that are supplied
with our tablets – Mac and I-tunes, Android and Google, etc.
Disc space; yes there's no two ways about it we can get 64-plus gigs on a tablet now;
many more on a laptop and not quite so much on an e-reader.
Okay. So, now we're looking at disc space again at the top but we're now looking at
additional contents. Additional contents on the e-reader are few and far between. You
may get the odd apps now and I think that will increase but it's your tablet that has
the most apps, especially with your Android and your IOS and I-tune apps.
A laptop of course you can have both options there.
Suitable for consumer books versus suitable professional books; well, we're looking at
text books and there's no two ways about it our text books, journals are still far more
available on our basic computers rather than through the tablet gateways or even less so
on the e-readers. So that is something to be thinking about.
We're going to just have another look at this idea of font styles and resizing, reverse
colours and possible TTS. We have real concerns here about copyright issues and about the
amount of changes that can be made to a particular format of a book. And on your e-readers it
is very limiting. We know that Amazon and others have gone through courts and through
other things in America that have made it very difficult for their schools to have e-readers
across the curriculum because they don't comply with 508; that is the laws in the USA.
The same is true here in the UK. We need to be very careful that we're not providing tablets
that don't offer all the accessibility that should be available to our students. So where
we've said possible TTS we need to be aware that text to speech is an option that we need
to look for, for many of our students with dyslexia, visual impairments and blindness.
It is important and sadly it's not always available.
I think what is undoubtedly true is that the tablet still wins in that it h as built-in
accessibility, such as Voiceover, Talk-back, etc. as well as the sort of accessibility
on the app options; so stanza for instance can change colours and have larger fonts.
But at not time are you aware that when you download that book you will know that it can
offer this accessibility. There research that we've done with over 30 of these individual
I-pads, I-formats, I-readers, e-readers, whatever you want to call them, we've discovered that
the book you particularly want may not be accessible when you download it, due to copyright,
DRM, whatever reason the user has an experience that is delivered to them in a way that the
publisher and those who've actually built the e-reader and the app have decided. The
user may not necessarily be able to change the look and feel of what they have just downloaded.
So, what are we downloading? Well, we're downloading a mix of what we know as formats file types.
You'll see something called DBT there – the daisy talking book. The trouble about that
is, is it probably should be DTB and I think there's a mistake there on that particular
slide. But what I would say about the daisy talking book is that we hope that it will
amalgamate with the e-pub3 to offer this navigation, to offer this accessibility. The other thing
is we have a mobi reader, we have a pdf, we have html, we have I-books particular own
format, we have Kindle’s own format. As a user you don't necessarily know what
any of those formats mean. When we're working with students and we talk about these formats
all they are interested in is the fact that they can actually read it in a way they want.
So, we need to be looking at that much more carefully when we are working with out students
and our e-readers. Cost implications are huge. When we're interviewing
students, asking them about their experience with e-readers we find very few of them are
using them. We find that often they might have helped granny with their Kindle but when
we actually lend them our Kindles they seem to find them extremely easy to work with;
they can flip between books, they can actually find their pdfs on them within the libraries.
We can actually help them download accessible texts onto these e-readers, but at a cost.
And the cost for the e-readers is undoubtedly less than the tablets. The cheapest Kindle,
£89 in Amazon when I looked yesterday. The most expensive I-pad £659 when I looked on
Apple’s website. Now that gives you 64 gigs of memory. It gives you wifi, it gives you
connectivity, it possibly gives you videos coming down at the fastest rate you could
possibly want, if you're lucky enough to have a good wifi connection. So it provides you
with that flexibility that you wouldn’t necessarily get on an e-reader.
We need to be thinking about cost if we're going to be thinking about this across the
schools. And Apple, as we know, have been working hard to encourage schools to take
on their I-pad technologies because, obviously once you're into the I-pad, you're into I-tunes,
your into Macs and you're into their libraries. The same can be said about Kindles, you're
into their library. So, we need to see how we can open this all up. We need to make it
easier for us to be able to download formats that we actually feel are more suitable for
our students to work on these tablets and e-readers.
So, we've got some decisions to make and they're not easy and none of them are necessarily
right. Just like choosing schools, choosing books, choosing anything in life no one decision
is going to be right at any particular time for any particular child. We're in to a gamble
here. In fact Drinkwater even says there are issues
with e-readers. He was quite depressing in his research. He happened to mention the fact
that there's a lack of academic content. Well, we know that text books in accessible formats
are one of the hardest things to find and, as we've discovered in several research projects
recently the sorts of things that load2learn are doing, that the accessible resources project
showed meant that our students who needed accessible texts had to go to a specialist
library, had to use specialist producers, have to find special publications and yet
they need to have the text at the same time as their peers.
There is no way that we can actually help someone who needs a scientific text book to
have it within the day; it's going to take hours to change the endless mathematical equations,
chemistry and say, physics functionality into a sort of liner presentation that can help
a blind student understand a complex lesson. And yet our non-visually impaired student
is able to look at it, see it on the page straightaway. So, we have a gap. It's a gap
that is not going to ever be easy to fill at all times. But electronic text does offer
that option. Okay. Drinkwater says that e-books are fiddly,
fragile and need charging. Well, we know that. Fiddly because some of the buttons are a bit
small. Fiddly, for instance, for the Kindle where you have a tiny keyboard and when you're
searching for a book if you're visually impaired it's extremely difficult. Fragile; okay you
reverse your car over your I-pad it's not gonna last but then if you leave your book
in a puddle it's not gonna last either. So, I think fragility is something that we shouldn’t
be too worried about. We gave out 12 I-pads to some very, very,
shall I say, not very caring students of technology at a particular school that I went to. We
had enormous fun over ten weeks, watching them enjoying the use of this technology;
not one was smashed. Forty laptops went out to students in the
accessible resources project; not one laptop was damaged. I think someone else managed
to break a screen of one of them but it certainly wasn’t the student that had been given the
laptop. So fragility is not something that we need to be thinking about too carefully.
Needs charging; yes. Needs charging with an e-reader; not such a difficulty because we
know they last longer, they can do them overnight but I-pads and laptops charging units all
over the place, plugging in, in the case of a laptop when you've got a lesson; not easy.
The I-pad that's had its video and its time recorder and its music playing long standing
is not going to work throughout the whole of a lesson if you've had it on all evening
before. So you have got difficulties there with charging.
But this is the worst one. This is the one that confounds us. We know that digital rights
management is important. We know that having restrictive licensing is important. For publishers
we don't want copyright to disappear out of the window. But we need to find our way round
some of the laws so that we can support our students in the best way possible.
For those students who are dyslexic who do not have a registered disability, who are
finding it hard to download texts in a format that suits their needs. We are still struggling
to work to a way that will actually support them in the classroom, at the same time as
their peers. So I think this is something that we need to be looking at more carefully
but it's going to take time because the publishers need to be able to support their authors,
their companies and everything else. So, it's not an easy option just to say that we can
get rid of copyright. And in fact sharing books is something that libraries have been
looking at and lending and the rights to lending is something that is of a great concern to
them at present. Drinkwater talks about environmental issues,
the inability to replace a battery. Well, I think we need to be careful about this one
as well, because actually very often having three thousand books on one piece of technology
is pretty amazing when it comes to actually looking at the printing of those three thousand
books. So, I'm actually quite happy with this credential for environmental friendliness
but perhaps as an argument that needs to be had at another time.
I want to look at the positive issues. I want to say that research has shown that the benefits
of e-books outweigh the disadvantages. I want to say that I've seen the excitement of children
when they've picked up a piece of technology that's going to read the book back to them
and they're going to see the text on that screen. And they've walked into the classroom
and they've sat down with their peers and they've been reading at the same time as their
peers. They've then been able to put up their hand and answer a question at the same time
as their friends without being concerned about what they've read because they know what they've
read is something that they've at last understood. I want to say to you that for many people
with print disabilities e-books offer access options impossible with ordinary print.
Thank you. Thank you for watching. For more tutorials
or information about load to learn please visit load2learn.org.uk or contact us on 0300
303 8313. Copyright 2012 Dyslexia Action and RNIB. Licensed
under the creative common licence by attribution for non-commercial purposes and shared alike.