Alternative Formats
This is a starting page for our resource on alternative accessible formats for people with dyslexia, visual impairments and other reading difficulties.
You may find these links useful:
- Our article on Creating Accessible Formats.
- Alternative formats - your country needs you. An article on what we all need to do to make accessible format materials (AFM) more easily available.
- JISC Techdis’s resource on making electronic documents accessible, called ‘Accessibility Essentials Series’.
- Our suggested draft for a policy for you to make as part of your Disability Equality Scheme, called ‘Towards a Corporate Policy on Accessible Format Materials’.
- Boston University Office of Disability Services shows how a work flow might be carried out for creating DAISY books.
- Access Technology Higher Education Network on E-Text and Alternate Media Production in particular Got-E-Text? on using high volume document Imaging (Adobe Acrobat Capture).
- altformat.org which is sponsored by Dolphin with support from RNIB, BDA etc and has run some seminars, with an emphasis on DAISY.
- Dealing with PDFs an article originally written for BDA Contact magazine on dealing with PDFs. Ian Litterick’s presentation on the The Right to Read: Reasonable Adjustments for Reading Impaired Students at BETT 2007 (900k Powerpoint).
- Books For All: Accessible Curriculum Materials For Pupils with Additional Support Needs from Edinburgh’s CALL centre: a major report on what is needed and how to provide it.
Some relevant tools are:
- Dolphin EasyConverter is the first package designed to produce a variety of accessible formats from one source. Intuitive to use, quick and cost-effective, EasyConverter is a great tool for colleges, schools and organisations that want to produce accessible formats for their students, staff or clients.
- Dolphin EasyProducer (Word -> DAISY);
- Dolphin Publisher (Word -> DAISY);
- Texthelp PDF Accessibility Editor;
- Texthelp Read & Write Gold;
- Adobe Capture (volume OCR -> PDF, html etc);
- Adobe Acrobat;
These all work on PCs, although they produce materials which can be used on Macs. They, and others to come, are at various stages of availability. Format conversion is a main focus of AT developers at the moment.
