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

My EASI Webinar

I am very excited about my upcoming webinar for EASI. It will be four live sessions April 21, 28, May 12, 19 (By the way this was rescheduled from a March date). There will also be three asynchronous discussion sessions. This webinar is built around my recent LRP book on managing AT in higher ed. Select here to go to EASI’s announcement about this webinar.

What is most exciting to me is that it will be delivered on the web. The web is certainly one of the most important educational “venues” of the future and EASI’s Norman Coombs has literally years of experience providing educational events on the web. I think our collaboration will make for a memorable training experience. .

Webinar Focus

Those of you familiar with my work know that I emphasize AT management strategies for practitioners in higher education. Managing AT is a process and the better we understand our goals, the various tech pieces, our resources and our limitations the smoother our operations will run. And that not only benefits the student, but also the harried and overworked DS or AT coordinator.

Of course, technology is central to any workshop on AT, but there are different ways to approach technology; you can take the micro approach and discuss an application’s operational key combinations, installation quirks etc. or you can take a more macro approach and discuss types of AT and how they work in the larger university environment. Both approaches are equally valid, I just happen to take the macro view because it fits well with the management discussion.

Who Should Take This Webinar?

This training is very helpful to DS or AT coordinators who are relatively new to the field and are still gaining experience. Experienced managers who want to integrate their AT offerings into a cohesive program, but are finding it fairly challenging will also benefit from this webinar. If, on the other hand, you are trying to find out things like what the keystrokes the screen-reader JAWS needs to read footnotes, you should seek a different workshop.

A Brief Story

I was leaving a conference in Nevada last summer and the line for the airport shuttle was long and not moving. I turned to the person behind me and asked if he wanted to share a cab and he said yes. On the way to the airport he asked if I remembered him and I admitted that I did not. He told me he had taken my work shop in Pittsburgh a year or two ago and he said that the workshop helped him get a job as a DS coordinator. Well, I can’t promise such results for everyone, but if you are truly interested in successfully organizing, implementing and managing your college’s AT program then you will benefit from this webinar.

A Word About Me

I do workshops, consulting and even wrote a book, but my full-time job is as the AT coordinator for the University of Oregon. I work all the time with real students, real faculty, real campus IT people, real campus web developers etc. You get the idea, I fight the same fight you do every day. The material in my workshops comes from this distinctive and authentic environment.

Carl Brown
1946 - 2008

The AT professional family has lost one of its most esteemed members. Carl Brown, Director of the High Tech Center Training Unit (HTCTU), died November 21, 2008 in Northern California. One simply cannot overstate Carl’s importance to the field of assistive technology, especially in higher education. He steadfastly championed this cause for over 30 years.

I had the very good fortune of participating in his training program in the early 90s. Carl and his staff at the time, Wayne Chenoweth and Marcia Norris, produced trainings that remain the standard by which others are judged to this day.

Carl Brown had the greatest vision and the most resolute determination of anyone I have ever known in the AT field. For many it will be hard to understand this loss because Carl promoted ideas, programs and philosophies rather than himself. But make no mistake; absolutely no one has had greater influence on shaping and defining AT in higher education than Carl Brown.

One trick I quickly learned during those training days was that if you brought your lunch back to the HTCTU, the chances were good that you would end up having lunch with Carl and whoever else was around in the conference room. I have fond memories of those lunches. My very first in-depth class about the internet was done by Carl in 93 or 94. Not only was he enthusiastic about the internet in its then rather primitive state, but it was clear he could see the future and the great possibilities the internet held. Also in those days I “toured” the De Anza College campus in a virtual reality that Carl built. It was a completely text and command line environment, but you could enter rooms, explore objects and even travel across the campus. As I said, he was man of vision.

It has been years since I have spoken with Carl, but his influence remains in much of my daily work. This is truly a very sad loss. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.