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Conclusions 

Much of the knowledge and technology needed to expand the accessibility of electronic textbooks for students who are blind or visually impaired exists already. For example, speech input/output and tactile input/output devices as well as special software which can enhance the accessibility of electronic textbooks are commercially available today even though they are often very costly. However, ensuring that most currently-adopted electronic textbooks and those likely to be adopted in the future are made accessible to students in the most logical and cost-effective manner will require further detailed analysis and planning. Perhaps most importantly, it will require collaboration among several communities including textbook publishers, media accessibility researchers, software and hardware developers, teachers of the visually impaired, consumer advocates, Internet and on-line service providers and state government. Only with this level of collaboration can accessibility be provided in the most logical and cost-effective manner.

Future efforts to expand accessibility must address the need for standards and development guidelines that facilitate access in newly developed electronic textbooks. Specifications for new programs must also include features that allow for redundancy in the presentation of their materials.

Providing accessible electronic textbooks to schools could have benefits for students with other disabilities as well as for students with no obvious disabilities. For example, electronic textbooks could be designed in a flexible manner to accommodate the varied learning needs of students who are blind and hearing impaired.

• On-screen text that is spoken not only helps visually impaired, reading disabled, dyslexic, and other students with disabilities, but also students who learn better by receiving multimodal input rather than by relying on one sense.
• Printed text that is spoken impacts two sensesûauditory and visual. Many studies have shown that multisensory impact enhances comprehension for all students.
• Visually presented materials that are closed-captioned or which have descriptive audio tracks also provide multisensory input, enhancing comprehension. Captioning also provides students with the ability to search and find audio text with a computerized search engine.

When that flexibility is designed into the textbook itself, learning activities can be customizedùnot just for students with disabilities, but for all students. Thus, the learning benefits accrue not just to those who most urgently need these accommodations but to mainstream learners as well.

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Last Revision: July 30, 2002