[senit] Switch accessible electronic books

I'd like to start a debate about how switch users, and other users of

Agreed - starting specifying what we need to do to provide efficient and
effective access is the first thing - what else needs added to this list,
and how shall we fill in the details?

A single switch user (or two switch, or someone using IntelliKeys,
communication aid, eye-gaze or head-controlled mouse etc) should be able to:

   1. Open the book from the library
   2. start reading where they left off
   3. Navigate through the contents and structure
   4. Go to a particular chapter or page
   5. Turn the pages
   6. Swap between the current page and the contents page
   7. Change views (e.g. single or two page view, zoom in/out)
   8. Use Find/Search and index tools
   9. Add bookmarks, text notes and comments 

_______________________________________________
Paul D. Nisbet
Senior Research Fellow
Communication Aids for Language and Learning (CALL) Centre
Moray House School of Education
University of Edinburgh
Paterson's Land, Holyrood Road
Edinburgh EH8 8AQ
Tel. 0131 651 6236     Fax 0131 651 6234
email Paul.Nisbet at ed.ac.uk
http://callcentrescotland.org.uk 
http://www.AdaptedDigitalExams.org.uk 
http://www.booksforall.org.uk  

_________________________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
[mailto:senit-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Richard Walter
Sent: 17 January 2008 20:38
To: senit at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: Re: [senit] Switch accessible electronic books

Paul Nisbet wrote:
> I'd like to start a debate about how switch users, and other users of
> assistive technologies (e.g. communication aids, IntelliKeys, eye-gaze
> systems, speech recognition, head-operated mice) can access electronic
> books.
>
>  
Yes an interesting one.
I think we could do with a general reader that was easy to use and alter
-so I would have thought that an open format would be better than one 
that is owned commercially and thus liable to change every few years and 
could possibly have restrictions on the distribution.
PDF is more or less an open format but it is not switch accessible.
You could cobble together text reader with a pdf- I don't know if you 
could make it all switch accessible using a switch interface, certainly 
I think you could do page turning.

You can obviously make accessible books in Powerpoint, Clicker 5, 
Hyperstudio, SwitchItmaker, Opus etc etc
Powerpoint limited to a single access point if using switches, and all 
of them need quite alot of work to create a complete book.

Perhaps we should start from the other end and say what it is we need in 
a generic talking book reader.

Richard Walter