Service ensures access to course materials for students with disabilities

Service ensures access to course materials for students with disabilities

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor 217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

About 1,000 students on the UI campus are identified as having disabilities. Ensuring that those students have access to the same learning materials as their non-disabled peers is one of the responsibilities of Angella Anderson, disability specialist and supervisor of text conversion in the Text Conversion Office in the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services. “The law requires that public colleges take appropriate steps to ensure that communications with students who have disabilities ‘are as effective’ as communications with students who don’t have disabilities,” Anderson said. Communications – which include verbal presentations, print-based communiqués or educational materials and digital resources on the Internet – must be delivered in a timely fashion, equally accurate in translation and available in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and the individual’s disability. If print materials are not available in an accessible format, the Text Conversion Office can convert them to alternate formats such as text (.txt), Adobe Portable Document Files (.pdf), electronic audio files (.mp3), Braille and large print. Each academic year, the office converts an average of 140,000 pages, serving about 50 students. The office recently acquired the equipment to caption videos and provides that service on a prioritized basis according to need. “If the producer/owner of a video can provide a transcript of the video, that will substantially reduce the cost of the captioning,” Anderson said. “Captioning videos is a very labor-intensive process. It can take two to three hours to caption a one-hour video.” To comply with copyright laws, the Text Conversion Office must obtain approval from video publishers before it can caption videos, just as it must obtain clearance from publishers before converting textbooks, unless the UI owns the copyright. However, to cut costs and help reduce the turnaround time, departments can caption videos with MAGpie, a free Java2 application that runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP and on Mac OSX. MAGpie can be downloaded from the Web site of WGBH, the public radio and television station in Boston.

“We don’t want to be in the business of captioning every department’s videos if they can do it themselves,” Anderson said. “We want to focus mainly on serving the needs of students with disabilities who are in classes that will be showing VHS tapes or DVDs that have been shown many times but have never been captioned. Of course, we will do Web captioning for departments who cannot do their own.”

Students soon will begin registering for fall classes. Students who use either video captioning or text conversion services must furnish their class schedules to Anderson. Instructors who will have a student with a print disability who uses text conversion services are contacted and asked to submit their book orders to the Illini Union Bookstore. Publishers are contacted to obtain electronic copies of books. Otherwise, the Text Conversion Office has to cut and scan the textbooks. As faculty and staff members plan to show videos in their classes or as they plan to create videos that have the potential to be seen by a large group of people, they should consult with the production company about captioning them. “Realistically, we don’t know when a student with a hearing impairment will take classes that show videos,” Anderson said. “It would be impossible for us to go through every video made thus far and have it captioned. However, if it’s already captioned, we won’t get into a situation where the student might get behind in the class because we have to caption videos for them.”

Anderson said a student who is deaf recently contacted her to complain that an instructor was posting videos of each class lecture to the Web, but they weren’t accessible to her because they weren’t captioned. By the time the student contacted Anderson, 17 lectures had been posted, a significant backlog for the Text Conversion Office to convert – and a significant challenge for the student to digest once the videos are captioned. Although Rehabilitation Services can arrange for sign language interpreters to interpret lectures, it’s difficult for students to watch a video and an interpreter simultaneously, Anderson said. Additionally, many students who are deaf or hard of hearing do not use American Sign Language.

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