JISC

While many students take being able to walk into a library, pick up and read a book for granted, there are over 15,000* students in UK higher education registered with a disability, for whom this experience is not always as easy.

At the 2008 Claud Conference – Not Always the Full Text: Working towards accessible learning resources – a group of librarians and disability access officers gathered to share best practise and hear first-hand from students on how their needs are being met.

Caroline Moughton chair of Claud explained the value of being able to bring together experts from across technology, publishing, library practitioners and users to learn from each other, as well as understand each others challenges.

‘The annual Claud conference enables members and non-members to share best practise. There are issues that we are all faced with in terms of helping to make material accessible for learners and being able to share in this way is invaluable,’ said Caroline.

Alistair McNaught, senior advisor for further education from TechDis, a JISC funded service, highlighted that not every solution to enable resources to be accessible or make learning easier has to be expensive.

‘There is free software that you can download that enables you to edit recordings. You can create your own podcasts, which can be audio descriptions of how individuals can access information.

‘This is a very quick and straightforward way of not only making information available for individuals with visual impairments but it is a way of adapting your materials to enable all learners to access materials in a way that suits their learning style.’

Alistair also demonstrated how to made a PDF file, accessible by changing the page layout so that scrolling across the page to read text is taken away."Adapting your materials to enable all learners to access materials in a way that suits their learning style."

During the conference learners with disabilities shared their experiences both positive and not so positive of their further and higher education journeys in gaining qualifications.

Jane Lovett who, despite a visual impairment, studied English at the University of Oxford explained that it took her professor nearly two years to understand that she, and the library, needed a copy of the course reading materials at least a term in advance. ‘I needed the material earlier to allow me to arrange for the text to be produced in Braille,’ she said.

On the positive side the support that Jane received from the Oxford University library was invaluable in helping get access to materials so that she could complete the course.

It became clear from the conference that there were a number of best practises taking place in libraries, for example using technology with e-books, the TechDis service and working in collaboration with publishers to enable access to materials.

But there were also aspects that everyone was looking to work on improving, educating course tutors to delivering learning material in different formats, for example.

Clare Hodder from the Publishers’ Association (PA) helped the delegates understand the business models involved in adapting a textbook into an alternative format. Clare also explained that PA is working as pragmatically as possible to support the need for alternative formats.

She also said that although there have been achievements, ‘Publisher Lookup’ - an innovative facility enabling librarians to find out contact details for which publisher holds the titles that they wish to convert into alternative formats. This has been developed in conjunction with TechDis which is a step in the right direction, but she also accepted that there is always room to improve.

The Claud Conference ended with a discussion around the desire for authors to write in plain clear English, how giving all learners the opportunity to access resources in different formats gives people the opportunity to use different learning styles, and asking the question: ‘Could it be possible to have all lecture resources in an electronic editable format to fulfil the individual learner’s requirement?’

Claud was formed in 1996 and is made up of library staff working within the disability field in 23 universities in the south and south west of England. Its aim is to disseminate information on disability and establish good practice within library disability provision.

*According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) the total number of students in the 1994/05 academic year known to have a disability was 15,699.