Partnerships and Leveraging Existing Services

One thing I emphasize over and over in my workshops is the importance of partnerships and leveraging existing services. Last year I worked with a school that hired their campus print shop to do the bulk of their alt-text work and charged on per-book basis. This is a great example of utilizing existing services rather than going to the expense of duplicating what is already being done on campus.

This past winter I was involved in serving a student that required Braille. The student was in a short-term and time-compressed program and the advance notice and preparation had not been handled very well.

I have student transcribers working for me and they do a very good job Brailling books that have very straight forward formats. In this case, however, the texts were more like work books that presented information in multiple columns and used spatial relationships on the page to convey meaning.

We investigated having the job done start-to-finish with several Braille services. The costs were high, but that is to be expected, they’re worth it. Time, however, was another factor with which we were dealing.

We do have a LOC certified Braillist in our town and while I knew her, we had never worked together. I met with her and proposed a workflow that would get us quality Braille formatting done within our time constraints.

The workflow went like this. We would cut and scan the book. A student worker would do a basic “cleaning” of the formatting. This was to conform to what was in the original book and there was no effort to reformat for Braille. A PDF and the Word file were sent to the Braillist. The PDF was for the Braillist to use to review the original page. The Braillist would then reformat the page so that it made sense in Braille. A Duxbury Braille file was emailed to us which we embossed in our own shop.

This turned out to be the most efficient way to get quality specially-formatted Braille to our student. One leverage aspect of this is that the Braillist was only spending time on her area of expertise, she was not wasting time scanning, embossing etc. I realize larger operations have people to scan and such, but it is always more expensive to hire a job done (in this casing scanning) than to do it yourself. We also leveraged our existing scanning and converting operation to contribute what it knows how to do well. Besides offering timely delivery, it also cost us far less than contracting a service to do the whole job.

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Next Month's Blog

Evaluating Uncommon Accommodation Requests

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Conference Calendar

Accessing Higher Ground
November 10-14, 2009