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Last week (April 22, 2010) Samuel R. Bagenstos, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on technology accessibility, civil rights, and federal law. It is a long piece of testimony, so I decided to break it into parts to make it easier to digest.

I am choosing to look at the the issue of “electronic books,” (i.e., e-books) first since it comes up that way in the chronology of  testimony.

First, let me say that I think the testimony is very articulate and accurate in summing up the topic and providing both a historic reference and a clear and precise justification for why we need to focus on the topic. Mr. Bagenstos begins by speaking in general terms discussing the importance and the ubiquity of this technology and how it has the potential for greatly leveling the playing field for persons with disabilities. He then describes the controversy over the Kindle DX and how the Department of Justice (DoJ) took action when it realized the devices were not completely accessible to students with disabilities.

Here is the excerpt from his testimony:

Accessibility issues arise outside of the Internet as well. Most significantly, as schools increasingly use electronic texts, the inaccessibility of many electronic book readers has become more and more salient. At the same time, however, the use of electronic texts holds great promise for people with disabilities. Students who are blind or have low vision have long used a form of electronic text as an accommodation that enables them to access the course materials their classmates use. These electronic texts, which are converted from standard print texts, are read on a computer, using a screen reader or a refreshable Braille display. In order for these electronic texts to be truly usable by someone who is blind or who has low vision, however, the texts must be coded with structural data so that the assistive technology can properly identify where to begin reading or where a sentence or paragraph begins and ends.

This system disadvantages blind students in colleges and universities as compared with sighted students, because it can take considerable time for a university to locate texts from publishers, and convert the text to a format usable by a screen reader or similar assistive technology. As a result, all too often course materials are not available to blind students until well after classes have begun. If you ask just about any disability student services center at a major university, you will learn how significant this problem really is. Imagine as a student being unable – on a routine basis – to obtain your course materials for the first four months of the semester. As an alternative to obtaining converted texts from the publisher, universities may scan printed texts in order to provide them in electronic form. But this method can result in a “text dump,” which lacks structural data to ensure proper reading by assistive technologies. Conversion errors, too, are common. So, the choice available to blind students prior to use of the new, electronic book readers was to receive accurate materials months into the semester or inaccurate materials in a more timely manner.

The emergence of dedicated electronic book readers thus holds great potential to place students with disabilities on equal footing with other students. But that happy result will occur only if the electronic book reader is equipped with text-to-speech capabilities, so that it may read the electronic text aloud. In a few moments, I will discuss the Department of Justice’s settlements in investigations of colleges and universities that used the Kindle DX, an inaccessible electronic book reader, as part of a pilot project. At the time the Kindle DX was used in this pilot project, it contained text-to-speech capabilities B meaning that it could read the electronic text aloud, rendering the text audible and therefore accessible to blind persons. Unfortunately, the device did not include a similar audio option for the menus or navigational controls. Without text-to-speech for the menu or navigational controls, blind students could not operate the electronic book reader independently, because they had no way of knowing which book they selected or how to access the search, note taking or bookmark functions of the device. Electronic book readers developed by companies other than Amazon also pose barriers to use by individuals who are blind or have low vision, typically because they entirely lack a text-to-speech function.

But a dedicated electronic book reader can be made accessible. From the user perspective, an accessible electronic book reader might speak each option on a menu aloud, as the cursor moves over it, and then speak the selected choice aloud once made by the user. Special key strokes might be programmed specifically for blind users. For example, the user would press the alt-A key any time something related to accessibility is needed, at which point a menu with additional choices would come up allowing the user to scroll over the menu as described above. Appropriate coding would mean that the text, even mathematical formulas, or poetry in which line lengths vary, would be read aloud coherently. In this way, the user with the disability would gain access to all the information on the printed page.

Apart from the issue of the accessibility of e-books,  Mr. Bagenstos’ testimony also, more briefly, details the issue of general web accessibility. In this section, to be described in a separate blog entry, he notes that there have been some inconsistent responses on the part of the DoJ over the years.

The testimony ends with more details about the specifics regarding the Kindle DX case and the settlement with the several universities who had employed these devices.

My impression is that the testimony doesn’t really do much in terms of changing any position that the DoJ has held, but rather reaffirms the position and perhaps sets some baselines. It may also provide us with a sense of where the DoJ will be focusing their attention when it comes to investigations regarding the rights of people with disabilities and “emerging technologies.”

I just presented a 45-minute talk about accessible Learning Management Systems (LMS) for PEPnet at RIT earlier this week. When I got home and started rummaging through unread e-mails, I gleefully discovered one from the Web 2.o Accessibility Forum on Linkedin. The discussion that immediately caught my eye was one from Ana Isabel BB Paraguay detailing a new document by Hadi Rangin from the University of Illinois. Hadi is one of my heroes and the source of a good deal of the information about the accessibility of LMS that I used in my presentation in Rochester. So in the words of Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story…

If you are interested in learning more about the accessibility of LMS (and many Web 2.0 things), with the research to back it, head on over to: How-To Guide for Creating Accessible Online Learning Content found on the cannect.org website. Thank you Hadi for this great resource.

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Image acquired through Creative Commons license – by Lizzardo on Flickr

I’ve reported about the Kindle more than a few times in this blog and have been generally fascinated by e-reader technology. I keep predicting it is the next big thing and with the pending announcement coming from the creatives in Cupertino, we may have another e-reader in the mix very soon.

That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.

Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.

In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the  universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).

The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.

And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.

Stay tuned.

I have been indulging in some more thoughtful reading of late about the nature of literacy and particularly the skills of our latest generation. I am a member of the TV Generation and when I was in high school, the educational community was all upset because the nation’s SAT scores had started to drop. There were all kinds of theories at the time: television and comic books were the prime culprits, particularly in my household.

When I was doing my masters degree in school psychology we took a field trip down to Princeton, NJ to visit Educational Testing Service the then-purveyors of Scholastic Aptitude Test – the dreaded SATs. We had a conversation about the declining SATs score with some of the big honchos at ETS and they were engaged in real research at the time about the causes of the decline. They had theories, and yes, television viewing was on the list, but not nearly as wicked as my mother contended. It seemed that there were a lot of factors at work, but we were assured that children were not getting stupider…

As I entered the field of education, I continued to harbor some guilt feeling that we, the TV Generation, did not really work as hard as previous generations. At the time, I sensed that we had had it easier and that there was less pressure to succeed. Clearly, we were allowed to goof off more than the kids who sat in our seats 5, 10 years earlier. After all, there were all these “new technologies” to play with and things to explore. Studying Latin, which had been a requirement for all student at my high school up until 1966, the year I entered, was now only offered as an elective. By the time I graduated, there were no Latin classes, the teacher retired and was not replaced. But this was okay, right?

In college, there were similar events where it looked like corners were being cut. Expectations and entrance requirements had been lowered from previous years, and graduation requirements lowered. But I wasn’t about to complain. Hey, it was the 70s and I was too busy playing my guitar, drinking beer and hanging with my friends.

But this sense of complacency has haunted me all these years.

In 1990, the brilliant film maker Ken Burns released his 11-hour epic “The Civil War” on PBS. I can still remember the episode where the letter from Sullivan Ballou was read. A letter written by a man on a battlefield to his wife telling her how he was “impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.” With Jay Unger and Molly Mason’s beautiful and haunting rendition of Ashokan Farewell filling the background, I was moved the first time, and the every time I’ve heard the elegant prose. A graduate of Brown University, a lawyer in civilian life and a man who rose to the rank of Major in the Union Army, Ballou clearly had achieved a level of literacy that far exceeds what most college graduates have today. Could a student today, write a Facebook entry as elegant?

Two articles that I just read talk about “the new literacy” and appear to take the position that things are not so bad. Clive Thompson published The New Literacy in last month’s Wired magazine which described a recent study by Stanford University professor Andrea Lunsford called Stanford Study of Writing. It seems Professor Lunsford thinks thing are not all that bad. Thompson poses this:

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

You should read Thomson’s whole piece. Good stuff.

The other is from Paul Barnwell and appears in today’s issue of Education Week. Entitled Literary Accountability in a New-Media Age, Barnwell, a middle school language arts teacher from Kentucky, suggests that the perceived decline in the literacy of today’s children is a function of the type of metric we are using to measure literacy. He states, “If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.”

I just don’t know. I can’t find the reference right now, but I recall a few weeks ago there was a report (I think it was in the Washington Post) complaining about students not being prepared for college and the costs of remediation for these students once they get to college is growing.

So, if you have thoughts on the topic, feel free to drop a comment. Me, I’m gonna go watch TV.

~j

I read this brief article from yesterday’s New York Times with great interest. Entitled, “Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom,” it grabbed my attention immediately.

Having spent a fair amount of my career dealing with distance education, I always found myself defending this style of pedagogy with my traditionally inclined colleagues. When logic and research failed, the comeback was always, “…well I just could not learn without there being a teacher in the room…”

Personal learning styles and technologically-literate students aside, there had been no definitive study to prove either way if distance education was as “effective” as traditional methods. The NYT’s article describes a new research study from SRI that may have done just this. I will now be endeavoring to pore through that study. In the meantime, I thought I should share some of the comments made about the study so far:

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

Hey, not shabby…

…and where have you heard this before (Hint: Me!)

The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.

Again, surprise, surprise, surprise! (deference to Gomer Pyle)

Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.

~jeb