The paradigm has shifted for accessibility issues in text, although it is pretty clear that publishers have not figured this out yet (what else is new?).
Back in the day, and how it is still mostly done today, the path to making a book or other printed text accessible for the visually challenged was to take the finished product and remake it. That could be done by having someone read it aloud (by recording or in person), reprinting it in braille, or nowadays having screen-reading software read from converted texts.
OCR technology had been around for decades, but it wasn’t until 1974 that Ray Kurzweil (yes, that Ray Kurzweil) started a company to develop the hardware and software necessary to make the technology generally available. But still, the leaps forward taken by OCR technology from then to now are still predicated on altering the finished product.
What we spend an unreasonable amount of time doing in the SDRC Alt Text department is taking finished textbooks and turning them into readable digital copies. Sometimes we get PDFs of the final proof from publishers, but even then we often have to run the product (or the scan, if we have to start from scratch with a hard copy text) through OCR software, then edit the final file format.
Editing takes hours. HOURS. What we do is make sure the page numbers were OCR’d correctly; we check that sentences don’t break from one page to another (very important if the text is going to be read audibly); and in some cases (for blind students) we actually describe photographs, graphs, tables and other visually-related data. Imagine describing all the graphs and tables in an economics textbook or a biology textbook, and you get the idea of how mind-bogglingly time consuming this is.
But most of our work is unnecessary, and in some cases works against the publisher. The fact is, ALL BOOKS PRINTED TODAY START OUT AS ELECTRONIC FILES. There is no hand-setting the lead type by going off the author’s hand-written pages. No. Everything is digital, start to finish.
So we are essentially recreating things that already exist.
The publishers are terrified about copyright issues so they refuse to send us “working” (i.e. readable PDFs or MS Word files) versions, but in their fear about digital copies “escaping” into the wild, they cut their own noses. We actually remake the books they so carefully, painstakingly edited and published into brand new digital editions that they only nominally, in name only, have control over.
The authors are truly shafted, because we take aspects – pictures, graphs, ect. – and rewrite them completely. We have to; a blind student cannot “see” a diagram of the brain. It is up to us to describe it to them. Do we get it right? We really try. But 100%? Let me tell you, I’m not a hard sciences person. Likewise I don’t speak French, so that French language workbook I had to edit the other day? I hope it’s right.
Publishers need to step up and realize they are only hurting themselves by not adapting to modern technology. Digital copies are going to be made, one way or the other. If textbook publishers started from the ground up, training their own editors and authors to make textbooks accessible, and if they designed their textbooks to work both in print and digitally regarding accessibility issues…well, I’d be out of a job. There would no need for the middle man like the Alt Text department because visually challenged students could just check the box on their order asking for it “in accessible format” directly from the publisher or reseller.
Honestly, I would not be upset to be made obsolescent like that. I’m confused as to why it hasn’t happened already.
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