Accessible Curriculum Materials for Students with ASN

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Page last updated: 03 September 2010

Digital books are available in a range of different formats. Some formats are more accessible to some people than others. We have divided sources of digital books into three groups. Sometimes you will be able to find a book in the format you need; sometimes you may need to convert it from one digital format into another; and if you can't find it you will have to make your own (see the Making Books page).

Accessible Book providers

The table below lists providers of accessible digital books. Most of the providers are voluntary organisations or publicly-funded services offering books for no or low cost but there are also some commercial providers of accessible digital books. Commercial providers of accessible digital books are listed in this section; commercial eBook suppliers are listed elsewhere because the eBook formats are not accessible for most print-disabled readers.

Publishers

Some publishers can provide digital copies of some of their books. You might think that they would have cupboard full of CDs with all their books which they can copy and send to you, but it's not quite like that: digital copies of older books may not exist at all; the print publisher may not have the rights to give you a digital copy; and there may be costs involved in obtaining digital copies (e.g. the publisher may have to pay the typesetter to convert from a desktop publishing program like Quark Express (which is really inaccessible) to another format).

If publishers can give you a digital copy it will probably be in PDF. The PDF may or may not be accessible for the print-disabled pupil and so you may need to adapt it or convert it from PDF into another format. Sometimes the publisher supplies a nice single PDF for the book, other times they give you a lot of separate files for individual chapters and sections. Sometimes the PDF files have 'galley marks' which are white borders with markings round the edge of the page that are used in the printing process - you can crop these out with Acrobat Pro. Sometimes the PDFs are image files (i.e. the text is not actually editable text) and so they need to be converted to text with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software before you can edit them or read them with text-to-speech software. See the Making Books pages for more on adapting and converting PDFs from publishers.

Publishers usually provide digital copies for individual pupils only - i.e. you can't dish out copies to any pupil and you can't put it up on the school intranet or on Glow for anyone to access. Some may charge for a copy (e.g. if they incur costs themselves in producing the digital version); others will provide it for free; some provide it for free provided you have bought a print copy. The Publishers Association has guidelines for meeting permission requests on behalf of reading impaired people which has more information on what publishers can and cannot be reasonably expected to provide.

TechDis provide an excellent Guide to obtaining publications in alternative formats and also host Publisher Lookup UK, which has contact details for academic publishers.

The table below has links to some school textbook publishers, along with information about their terms and conditions of supply of files. This is a work in progress: we will expand and update it when we can.

When you contact the publisher to ask them for a digital file of a book, give them:

• the full, correct title of the book including which edition it is;
• authors;
• ISBN;
• a summary of why you need it, why the pupil(s) can't access the paper copy, and what you will do with the file.
  

Commercial eBooks

The recent development of eBook readers like the Kindle, Sony Reader and the new iPad, plus software for reading eBooks on iPods, PDAs and mobile phones has encouraged publishers to produce books in electronic formats. There are many different electronic formats and the most common commercial formats are EPUB and AZW (the Kindle format). The first eBook formats and eBook readers were not very accessible, but the new Kindle and the iPad are much better - both can display text in a fairly large font size, and both have text-to-speech output (although not all Kindle eBooks have the text-to-speech enable - check before you buy).

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