By Donna Hemmila

UC is working on a collaboration with California State University to get e-books and other course material into the hands of disabled students faster.

"We have an agreement in principle to permit the sharing of textbooks and other materials that the CSU has in its Center for Alternative Media," said Clint Haden, UCOP director of campus life.

The agreement, which he expects will be signed by summer, would start a one-year pilot project in fall 2008. The nine UC undergraduate campuses would then be able to order electronic versions of books that qualified students with disabilities can access with screen-reading computer software, MP3 players or software that prints Braille.

CSU has a centralize Center for Alternative Media based in the chancellor's office at Long Beach that handles the acquisition of alternative format versions of class materials for its 23 campuses. That repository has many of the same texts UC students are using. A collaboration with CSU would not only allow UC campuses to share those materials, but also to share UC materials among the campuses. There is no mechanism to do that now, said Haden. It makes sense for the campuses to work together to make the process more efficient for students with physical and learning disabilities.

A 1999 state law requires textbook publishers to provide alternative formats of books to California students with disabilities. Actually getting the books from the publishers is another story.

"Usually that's a fruitless effort," said Martha Velasquez, alternative media specialist at UC Berkeley. "They should by law have to give us an electronic file, but they don't."

She spends months with some publishers trying to obtain the electronic format of a textbook. Even when she tries to order a book in advance of classes starting, she said, the publishers put up obstacles such as demanding a receipt to prove the student bought a hard copy of the book – for a new edition that hasn't even been shipped to bookstores yet.

"By then the student is in midterms," she said.

To deal with this problem, campus disability services departments produce the material themselves. The student buys the book, and Velasquez, with the help of a couple of work-study students, breaks the book apart and scans each page. Then the scanned file is converted into a format the student uses and corrected of any errors the conversions created. If the book is heavy in graphs and illustrations, she has to write descriptions of them so a screen-reader program can explain it. The process takes several days.

When Velasquez started working in alternative media at UC Berkeley a year ago, she said she had requests for about 150 to 200 books a semester. Now it is up to 400, and at the beginning of a semester she scrambles to get the books out to students. Having access to material other campuses have already obtained from publishers or scanned themselves will get the books to the students so much quicker, she said, and that can make a big difference in a student's success.

"It's so fulfilling when a student comes back at the end of a semester and says, 'I used to be a B-minus student. Now I got an A in this class.' It makes what we do so worthwhile."

Donna Hemmila is editor of Our University.