Hi Heather

In principle, if the PDF's are fully accessible, I would argue that they should be adequate on their own, but that may be optimistic as PDFs are rarely perfect. Your institution should be aiming at making its pdfs accessible for a variety of reasons, not all to do with disability awareness.

We have some more information about accessibility and PDFs at http://www.dyslexic.com/pdf, with links from there, particularly the TechDis one.

Depending on the level of magnification needed, a pdf could be problematic on a magnifier as it might require sideways scrolling, which is tedious. The student might need to use reflow (which is available in Adobe Reader) and/or text to speech (available but crude in AR) to help with the reading experience.

This is actually a similar issue to reading pdfs on small screens like mobile phones and ebooks and is why our CapturaTalk software has to reflow text in order to make pdfs readable on Windows Mobile.

In most cases an accessible pdf original is better than producing an alternative format, although MS Word is easier to make accessible than PDF.

Regards
Ian Litterick
Executive Chairman
www.iansyst.co.uk
www.dyslexic.com
www.re-adjust.co.uk
07860 926159
direct 01223 436680




-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for disabled students and their support staff. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Heather Blundell
Sent: 06 May 2010 16:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [DIS-FORUM] Scanning Responsibility

Dear All

We have a student with VI who requires course material in an alternative format.   The student is making the transition to the following IT (as recommended in NAR)

Microsoft Office Standard 2007 Education
Dragon Naturally Speaking v10 w/DSP400 Headset
F-Secure Internet Security w/3 Years Free updates
Kurzweil 1000 Readback v11
Claro Lightning Screen Magnifier USB Version
Olympus DS-65 Digital Voice Recorder Bundle.

The course materials consists of PDF's (84 in total) that are made available on the Intranet all students therefore have access to them.  A suggestion has been made for the student to enlarge such documents on the screen as a reasonable adjustment.

My questions are:

1.  How do other institutions manage this?

2.  Is it the departments responsibility to put the information in an alternative format given that this information is provided by the department for all students ?

Or

3.  As it is available on the intranet is it for a support worker paid for from DSA to put into an alternative format?

Thanks.
Heather


Heather Blundell
Disability and Mental Health Coordinator
University of Chester
01244 511056


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