September 5, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, a nonprofit organization in Princeton, N.J., hopes that its new digitally recorded textbooks will make reading assignments and research a little easier for students who have physical or learning disabilities.
This week the organization will introduce its new AudioPlus textbooks in CD format. More than 6,000 titles will be available, including many of the most requested titles from the organization’s library of more than 91,000 textbooks. In time, the organization plans to convert most of its titles to the new format, although it will continue to make titles available on cassette as long as students request them.
Morgan Roth, the organization’s vice president for public affairs, says that the new format offers a number of advantages over cassettes.
For example, a standard chemistry textbook that would have filled eight to 12 cassettes is now available on a single CD that is much more manageable for students than was the old technology, she says.
The digital format also allows students to move instantly to any page, chapter, or subheading in the book. Beep tones signal pages and chapters on the organization’s cassettes, but Ms. Roth says that making use of the tones can be “unwieldy.”
“If you have a reading assignment that requires you to jump from page 7 to page 147, you would have to fast forward like you would any other cassette, and count through 140 beep tones to get to the page that you want,” explains Ms. Roth. “That’s not necessarily convenient for students trying to use the technology in the classroom.”
Students can listen to the books on either a specially designed CD player or a multimedia computer with a CD-ROM drive and special software, both available through Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic.
Despite the development of increasingly sophisticated computerized text readers, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic will continue to offer textbooks recorded by volunteers who are experts in the subjects about which they read.
“There is absolutely a place in a disabled student’s library for all kinds of texts,” says Ms. Roth. But for certain fields of study, she says, it’s important for students to hear the information being read by someone who has a thorough knowledge of both the subject matter and its terminology. The volunteers, in addition to reading the text, also describe any graphic elements in the book.
“If there’s a chart or a graph or a map, these people have the expertise to explain it in context very well and very fluently,” says Ms. Roth. “That’s something that you can’t necessarily find in other digital formats.”
The next generation of AudioPlus books will display the written text on computer monitors, in sync with the narration. Studies show that students with learning disabilities who follow the text as they listen have increased levels of comprehension, retention, and reading speed, according to the organization. The new generation of books will also allow students with limited vision to read along as they listen.
Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic expects to finish outfitting its 32 recording studios with digital equipment in the next two years, at which point the organization will have spent six years and $24-million on the digital-recording program. The group earmarked a portion of the $40.5-million it raised during its 50th-anniversary campaign, which lasted from 1998 to 2001, to pay for the program.
For more information: Go to http://www.rfbd.org.
