Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 18th March, 2010
Alistair McNaught, Senior Advisor at JISC TechDis leads the Right to Read Alliance working group on eBooks and his latest report to the Alliance identifies several very promising developments in the area of accessible eBooks.
JISC RSC commissioned research by Shaw Trust into the accessibility of...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 18th March, 2010
Craig Mill, e-Learning Advisor at the JISC Regional Support Centre NE in Edinburgh, has written a very good guide to creating accessible Word and PDF documents which you can download from the RSC NE e-Inclusion web site. The Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution which means you ca...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 16th March, 2010
eBooks have been around for some years now without making much impact but recently there has been a lot more buzz about them. There are a lot of interesting possibilities with eBooks for people with print disabilities but the main one is access to books: if accessible eBooks could be purchased dir...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 24th February, 2010
Many people think that 'alternative format' means things like Large Print, Braille, audio, Daisy etc, but it also includes symbolised materials. Widgit software, who publish software for creating and using symbolised resources, are running a FREE day on symbols here in CALL on Wednesday 3rd March....
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 23rd February, 2010
Heather, the Scottish Voice, which can be downloaded free from CALL's Scottish Voice web site by anyone in Scottish schools, is a product of CereProc, an Edinburgh based company. CereProc make 'custom' voices by recording and synthesising human speech, and one possibility is to create bespoke comp...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 28th January, 2010
Another 54 books were added to the Books for All Scotland Database today.
There are 23 new books in PDF which have been produced by CALL Scotland. LTS funded the production of these books, which are scanned PDF copies of third and fourth year textbooks from various publishers including Heinemann...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 26th January, 2010
The Books for All programme is about learning resources in accessible, alternative formats for people who cannot access standard printed books.
Sometimes this is due to, for example, severe dyslexia, visual impairment, blindness or physical impairment. In these case it is self-evident that the r...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 22nd January, 2010
SQA have put up the 2009 adapted digital past papers on their web site for anyone to download. They cover all levels from Intermediate through to Advance Higher with a wide range of different subjects. This means you can now download papers from 2007, 2008 and 2009 for revision and practice.
In r...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 20th January, 2010
Another opportunity to learn how to make Books for All!
Learning & Teaching Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Government, would like to invite you to send a representative from your local authority to attend Books for All CPD event at Stirling Management Centre. This free CPD is a fo...
Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 18th January, 2010
A new version of FineReader has just been released and the basic OCR accuracy seems to be much better than the previous version 9 (which was actually much worse than version 8 - we carried on using 8 because 9 was so bad). Here's a screenshot of a PDF image that was recognised using FineReader 9:...
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