TRANSCRIPT Ð TSBVI Coffee Hour: Book Access for Students with Visual Impairment Ð 11/28/22
>>Renee: So hi, everyone. My name is Renee Toy. I am the learning resource director -- sorry, the learning resource center director here at Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. I am very happy to get to spend the afternoon with you. Thank you for choosing to spend your afternoon with us. I am going to talk about book access and then towards the end of the presentation Amanda Storaasli, who is our Braille transcriber and adaptive material specialist is going to show you how to download Braille book files from our school library. My part of this presentation is sort of two-fold. First, I'm really hoping to get you all really excited about getting books for your students in whichever format works the best for them. Secondly is to show you a variety of ways that you can get accessible books for your students. And the good news is there are so many ways to access books now. I'm sure I don't have all of them but I'm really hoping that at the end you'll have some better ideas of how to get books for your kiddos. Okay. So I put this slide in about the goal of reading because I want us all to remember that in teaching reading, our goal is to create readers. And we want our students to grow up loving books. And I do think that sometimes that gets lost with all of the things that students are required to do in school, all of the required reading, all the statewide testing here in Texas, at least. And so sometimes we tend to forget that we just really want our kids to love books. So this quote I've long been convinced that the central and most important goal of reading instruction is to foster a love of reading. I just like to keep that in mind for all of us. All right. This next slide is my plug for making a case for student choice in reading, allowing students to choose their own reading materials. And, yes, you know, I know that they have a number of books that they're required to read but research shows that the number one way to get kids to love reading is to let them choose their own reading material. And I think if we think about our own reading lives, books that we get to choose ourselves instead of books that we're forced to read, or even if you're in a book club and you have to read something you didn't pick can be not as motivating. So the quote on this slide is from Donalyn Miller, who wrote the book whisperer back in 2009. Some of you may know who she is. If you don't, Donalyn Miller was a classroom teacher in the Dallas area and she taught sixth grade for a number of years. She's a passionate book advocate and she's dedicated her life to creating readers. First, those in her classroom and now she works with adults who work with kids in helping them help their kids become readers. So her quote says, from the book whisperer, providing students with the opportunity to choose their own books to read empowers and encourages them. It strengthens their self-confidence, rewards their interests, and promotes a positive attitude toward reading by valuing the reader and giving him or her a level of control. Readers without power to make their own choices are unmotivated. So I just think that's a really nice quote for us to value our student choice in reading. All right. This next slide is about book access, meaningful book access. Hold on one second. I think I can't quite -- there we go. Meaningful book access. So children and adolescents need access to books at school and at home. That means that if they -- they're not going to become wonderful, great readers if they don't have access to a device or books. You guys know your students. You know that some students are lucky and have a lot of resources at their homes. But some students don't. They don't have books, especially accessible books, which is my second bullet point. If they don't have access to books then, you know, all of the competing activities for books, video games, TV, all the other things, you know, students aren't going to do it if it's difficult or if books are not available. So that's something that hopefully we can help our students. Giving them the accessible books that they need to read. All right. Kids need time to read and time to talk about what they're reading. Students at our school are busy -- and I'm sure your kids are too. Your students, but it's important to give them time to read and time to talk about what they're reading. I love when students come in to talk to me about what they're reading when they come into the school library. What's really wonderful is when I hear students talk to each other about what they're reading. And they make book recommendations. That's what I do with my friends, and those of you who are big readers, I'm sure you do too. And that whole time to read -- if you think about your own reading life, when I think about mine is there's never enough time so it almost feels wrong to make that time. But we really need to do it with our students if we want them to become readers. The next point, bullet point is the adults in children's lives need to respect their book choices. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a real book. Graphic novels are real books. Kids need to see that the adults in their lives respect what they choose to read. It might not be what you want to read but probably my most disturbing story about this is in the school library I had -- several years ago a fifth-grader come and she checked out about 20 Braille books and they were all elephant and piggy, kind of young books. But she was so excited. She couldn't wait. She brought these two big sacks of books back to her classroom. And later that afternoon her teacher, her classroom teacher at our school brought those books back to me and told me -- or asked me why are you letting her check out all these baby books? And that, my heart just sank and I just really hope that she did not say that to the child in her class. You know, it might not be what she wanted her to read but, anyway, to me that was a heartbreaking story and I have to balance keeping my relationship with teachers on good terms with hearing some of the horrifying things that they may say. All right. So kids also need exposure to a variety of genres. Not everyone likes fiction, like I do. A lot of kids like nonfiction. They might like stories about war, historical fiction. If you have a student who's not quite a reader, giving them exposure to all different genres can really help. Barriers to meaningful book access. We need to break down those barriers. It might be that a student doesn't have the device that they need, maybe at home they don't have Wi-Fi, no book access. Those are things that we need to be helping our students with. So accessing books is easy for them. We want children to live in book floods rather than book deserts. You may have heard of food desert where places in our country where it's very difficult to get food. The same can be true of book deserts. Kids who don't have access to books, they don't have families who can take them to, you know, the public library. They don't bring home books from school. And for our students, not having books in the format that they need can really be a barrier. And so that's something for us to think about. Mirrors and windows. Students need to have or kids need to have books that reflect who they are. Other characters in books who may be going through the same problems, the same issues. That can be really comforting to read about. And they also need windows, books that show them lives that are very different from their own. And I think this last part about restricted book access and book bans. I would be remiss if I don't bring that up. If you watch the news you will see there are many, many school districts across the country that are restricting access to books and having school librarians and even public librarians remove books from shelves. Most of the books that some groups want to have restricted contain characters of marginalized groups of people. A book that might have, you know, LGBTQIA characters and/or maybe substance abuse. Our students deserve to have books that reflect their own lives and I cannot imagine how terrible it would be to be someone who can identify with a book and being told that their lives are so terrible and so inappropriate that other kids are not allowed to read about them. So I think it's something, a very serious issue that's going on in our country and I think we all need to be mindful about that, which I consider a big problem. Okay. So we're going to move on to how to get books. So the Talking Book Program is the first program I'm going to talk about. I do have -- most of this section is the Texas State Library. I didn't think about people who might be coming from all over the country, but each state has their own state library and archives commission and it's just some of the links I have won't be appropriate for your specific state but you all would have a state library that can provide services to your kiddos. And so I'm sorry about that. So the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, also in our state called TSLAC, that works with the National Library Service and physically handicapped. This is administered by the Library of Congress, so it would be in your state as well. They provide free library services for Texans of all ages who qualify, who are blind or visually impaired or have a physical or reading disability. And this is a really wonderful, wonderful program. The Talking Book Program is not just audio, so I feel like that title is a little misleading. But registered patrons can borrow books and magazines and digital audio, Braille, and large print. The materials are mailed straight to your door, completely free of charge. They have more than 100,000 titles, including best sellers, young adult books, classics, mysteries, westerns, children's books. And also their collection includes hundreds of titles in Spanish, some in French, German, and many other languages. They also have more than 80 different magazines. So the Talking Book Program, it's a simple application process. They will send a Digital Talking Book Machine straight to your home. I've included a picture of the machine and also of the cartridge container and the cartridge that the digital talking book free of charge. It will play NLS digital cartridges. It will play audio files from Learning Ally -- you have to register your player from Learning Ally. And the player also takes a USB flash drive. I find our students, ones we work with, flash drives are harder to keep up with but the cartridge actually is essentially a flash drive. I purchased blank ones at -- oh, I can't think of -- sorry. I'm drawing a little bit of a blank. I just buy them. They're $13. Oh, at APH, sorry about that. Also our very savvy tech teacher has been able to reproduce these cartridges on our 3D printer just this year, and you can insert your own little flash drive and for us it's going to save us money because the kids go through these a lot. It's pretty easy to order books from the Talking Book Program. I've included the toll-free number in the Texas area but, of course, that will be different if you live out of state. You can also e-mail them. You can mail, or if you still use a fax machine, there's a way to contact them with fax. All right. The Braille and Audio Recording Download -- you may have heard BARD -- is part of the Talking Book Program. So once your students are registered and a Talking Book Program patron, it's pretty easy to apply for BARD services. And what this will do, it will give you access to downloadable books and magazines. You don't have to contact the program to mail things to you because you can use the BARD mobile app on an iOS device or Android or even on the Kindle, like a Kindle Fire. Always to access audio books, which I think is pretty wonderful. I will say some of our older students don't necessarily love the Digital Talking Book Machine and once they have a BARD account they usually want to return the machine. I encourage them to hang on to it. Save it for book emergencies. But the digital books are just so much easier just to carry around your phone. So BARD Mobile, this is a video of BARD Mobile on the iPad. So I'm just going to play it, if I can. It's all totally accessible. 

>>Double tap to play. [ Machine reading ] 

>>But it was better than nothing. 

>>Renee: So that's an excerpt from the Girl who Drank the Moon, which is one of my favorite books. It's easy to use on an iOS device. This next slide is just kind of what it looks like when you're on the website and how to do the BARD application instructions. And it's all pretty easy to do. And also if you call, if you have trouble, they're always happy to help you when you call them. All right. BARD Express. This is great. It's a Windows-based software. It's an app on your computer that makes it so much easier to download and manage books. I do a lot of book management on the computer in my office and before BARD Express, it was more challenging. I had to unzip the files and save them a certain way. It wasn't terribly hard but it was a little bit -- it wasn't as easy. Now BARD Express just does it all for you. And here are the blank cartridges from APH. I should have just waited until I saw this to talk about it. But it's easy to put a lot of books on a blank cartridge like that. I send them home, especially for summer reading. Kids who take the bus, they go back and forth from school. They're 4 gigabytes so you can put a lot of books on 4 gigabytes. They will hold 40 to 50 Goosebumps books, from experience. And then kids have them. So this is a screenshot of what BARD Express looks like. I mainly use the Bookshelf that I keep all the books on my computer until I run out of computer space and then I use the search BARD and just download the books and put them on cartridges for kids. It's very nice. Other devices that will work with BARD, Victor Streams, Victor Reader Stratus, the Stream will use an SD card and the Stratus will take an SD card or jump drive or flash drive. You do have to register these devices with the Talking Book Program so you're authorized to play the books. They'll also play with a Book Port DT that you can get from APH on quota funds. They will take the digital talking book cartridges or an SD card and the Book Port Plus, it's similar to Victor Stream, and that will take an SD card so you can have a portable device. We don't use these as much now that our kids have phones or our school issues iPads. And so these aren't as popular, but they're a great way to use for students who might not have the funds, money to buy, or if you work in a district that doesn't supply that sort of thing for students. I also have a whole other list of devices that will work with BARD, like BrailleNote or a Victor Reader Trek. Some of these I don't know what they are but lots of different devices that will work with BARD. I really think that BARD and the Talking Book Program is great for students because it will stay with them long after -- like they leave our school and long after they graduate. This is something that is free and they can use forever. Getting Braille from BARD. Braille files can be read online or may be downloaded for offline reading or embossing. If you have a Braille aware device you don't need to register it with BARD, it will just read. And the Braille file type is .brf and you have to unzip the files before they can be read. Okay. The next program I'm going to talk about is Learning Ally. And so Learning Ally, I'm going to say, wow. They have really upped their game the last few years. I used to think of Learning Ally as a place where kids could get their textbooks and that's kind of it. But they have so many books that are for recreational fun reading, little kids' books, children's books and young adult. And they are all human read -- not all of them but most of them are human read. They have over 80,000 incredible human-read audio books. That's right from their website. I love that they put "incredible" in there. Anyone with a print disability is eligible. And here in Texas it's free to K-12 students, thanks to a grant from the Texas Education Agency. I don't know about other states but I would imagine that this is a mostly free service for students with visual impairments. It's a very easy registration process. Learning Ally, the books are read by human narrators by specialists in every subject. So if your student needs to get like a physics book, it's going to be read by someone who has a background in physics and not by someone like me, who does not. And so all of the terminology and, you know, is going to be pronounced correctly. Their audiobooks are produced to meet accessibility standards for students with disabilities. So the books can be navigated to find specific chapters or page and you can set multiple bookmarks. Learning Ally has three different audio formats. The first is classic audio with just a human reading an audiobook without the text displayed. Voice Text with an H in parentheses, and that is a human narrator with text that you can follow along with as it reads. I have some examples of this in a bit. I think that is just a really great way to access books. I worked with a student last year and we read quite a few of the Magic Treehouse books. She picked and we read them together and it was a great way for her to access the books and it was a fun experience for both of us. And the last format is Voice Text S, and that's going to be a synthetic voice with text you can read along with as it reads. We all know our kids definitely prefer a human narrator but sometimes they're going to have to do the synthetic voice. That's available. All right. So Learning Ally, the apps to easily download books to iOS and Android smartphone and devices, PC or Mac computers and Chromebooks. You can use your NLS Digital Talking Book Machine after you register it with Learning Ally and it will play on a variety of daisy players like Victor Stratus and Book Port DT. Here is an example of Learning Ally, their voice text that has the lovely highlighting. This is a book, Alvin Ho. We'll listen to just a short excerpt. Whoops, sorry. Here we go. [ Video ] 

>>Chapter one, once upon a time. The first thing you should know about me is that my name is Alvin Ho. I am afraid of many things. Elevators, tunnels, bridges, airplanes, thunder, substitute teachers, kimchi, wasabi, the dark, heights, scary movies, scary dreams, shots, school. If there were no school, my troubles would blast away, just like that. I would dig holes all day. I would play catch with my gunggung. I would watch cooking shows. I would keep an eye on things. It would be fantastic. [ End of video ] 

>>Renee: That is a really great way to access books. This is on an iPad. You are change the background and foreground, all the highlighting colors. You can change the font. You can change the spacing between your words and the sentences and the margins and customize it to whatever works best for your student. Anyway, I just think it's a great way to access books. And one of the things that I struggle with as a school librarian is accessible graphic novels. And Learning Ally does provide some graphic novels, some current ones, novels that our kids want to read in an audiobook format. I'll play this very briefly. This is an excerpt from El Deafo from CiCi Bell. I am thrilled they provide this. [ Video ] 

>>I am pulled away from my parents and taken to a room. Somebody sticks a needle in my back. The fluid from her spine tells us she has meningitis. Her brain might swell. But she's only 4! 

>>Renee: Okay. So, anyway, I think that's great. All right. So Bookshare. 

>>Kate: Renee, I am so sorry to interrupt. A question came in. For the graphic novels does it provide a description of the images? 

>>Renee: It does on some of them, yes, it does. But I don't know about all of them. So I think -- well, I'm going to say I'm pretty sure it does. I may have to just find out and get back to you. I'm going to write it down. I thought it did but now that I'm like -- all right. I'll find out and see if I can get back to you. I don't know for sure. 

>>Kate: Thanks, Renee. 

>>Renee: Sure. Yeah, I have students who really do love graphic novels and if you have any of your kids are interested, especially Manga is huge. The print is smaller than really print in books and it's so painful to watch kids read so close to their eyes. And you can't change the font the way -- you can't change it and follow along like you can in their other books and Learning Ally. We're still working on that, on accessible graphic novels. So Bookshare is another organization, a nonprofit, that is I would say a really spectacular way to access books. They have pretty much the world's largest collection of accessible titles. What Bookshare is, it's an accessible online library for people with print disabilities. The last I heard, about every month they add approximately 40,000 new books. That is just a huge amount. I think they chop them up and scan them. So they're not perfect when you get them but there's -- they're provided in so many different file formats. It is, I think, really great. It's free for qualified U.S. students through the office of special education from the Department of Education, and even non-students, they're going to pay a low fee. I'm thinking it's about $50 a year. Which if you go to a bookstore and buy two or three books, you have spent $50. This is a really great way for anyone who needs an accessible print book. So how can you read Bookshare books? You can listen to the books with their text to speech voice. You can hear and see the highlighted words on the screen. You can read with digital Braille or enlarged font. You can read directly from your internet browser. It's pretty easy to access on your computer. I don't think that's the best reading experience but, you know, the kids, you know, they're different than me and they may be fine reading books on their computer. And you can create physical Braille or large print. I provided a reading tool link here as well. This is a Bookshare book using Dolphin Easy Reader on an iPad. It is the Dolphin Easy Reader voice, so it's not human reading it. 

>>Chapter one, a natural-born cynic. Flora Belle Buckman was in her room at her desk. She was very busy. She was doing two things at once. She was ignore her mother and she was also reading a comic book entitled. [ Machine reading highlighted portion ] 

>>Renee: Okay. So definitely not perfect but it's a way to access books. You can, like Learning Ally, you can change the background and foreground and highlighting colors and things to suit your students' needs. You can also use Voice Dream Reader. It's the synthetic voice but I do want to point out, I think they are adding some human-read books to Bookshare's library, but it's not that many yet. But they are moving that direction. I think that's the feedback most of the kids like the human-read voice. All right. So another cool thing about Bookshare: Lists. You may not know the latest and greatest young adult book, but you don't have to. You can look up some of their lists. If you have a student who loves sports or multicultural books, the Newbery winners. They have a ton of lists on their website and you can access those lists and become a book expert that way. All right. I've included a few things, adaptive reading ideas for your students who may not access traditional books. You can use story boxes, those are books with objects to support the story. Or activities to go with books. Planting seeds and singing songs to make the seeds grow, because that's right out of Frog and Toad that many of our students love. Songs, nursery rhymes, poems are always wonderful to share. Experience stories with Braille, photos, tactile symbols, our large print. APH is updating their tactile books so those books that those of us who were teaching back in the '90s, all those plasticy things that were not that great but better than nothing, they're updating them to be a better experience for our kiddos. And then of course paths to literacy where they have some great resources there. The Joy Player by APH, that is a great really device that will play WAV and MP3 files. It will use the NLS digital talking book cartridges but they will not play books from BARD, so you do have to have a source for books. But these players are designed to be used with individuals who have limited hand use because of a motor impairment. You can also, with external switches, you can cover up some of those buttons if there are too many. And also it comes with a big Velcro strip so you can Velcro it to your student's desk or a wheelchair or a walker or something like that. Okay. I've included some resources for other sources for books, SYNC YA. They do a wonderful program every year from about April to August and anyone can get two free audiobooks each week. It's on the Sora app, which is an app that many of the school libraries use for audiobooks and digital books. The Houston Public Library. Think about your public library, Houston Public Library offers my link digital card to anyone who is a resident of Texas. I feel sure that other big libraries are doing that more and more to their patrons who live in their state. Your school library, TSBVI, our website. Amanda is going to be showing you how to access books from our website, LS reference circulars, Audible, you have to pay for that. Storyline online, the Braille Institute. It's a great source if you have funds to purchase books. BookBub and Chirp are good ways to get discounted books. The international children's digital library. And then I have included a few reading sites that I really like, including some social media, paths to literacy, some podcasts, just some other resources that can help you find books. And I know Twitter is kind of crashing and burning but I'm still on it and I still follow plenty of people who have book information, library information, and ways to access books and authors. So I may have to update this slide for sure. And that's it. Thank you so much for letting me -- listening to me talk for 45 minutes. I'm really happy to share books and I hope you found something useful. I'm going to turn this over to Amanda, so I'm going to stop sharing my screen. 

>>Amanda: Hi, everybody. I'm Amanda. As Renee said earlier, I'm the Braille and adaptive material specialist, one of the three at the school. And also I'm sort of unrelated to this, I repair Braille writers, Braillers too. I am going to share my screen and show y'all how to download books that mostly that I've transcribed and then we've put up on the website -- and I still have a lot more that I need to put up. But that is another story. So on our website -- well, I'll talk about that when we actually get there. I need to go to -- I was not ready. My bad. TSBVI. Just go to our website, tsbvi.edu. We have a new website now so if you were familiar with the old one, it's totally different. But it's like the fifth menu thing over. Go down to "campus library," click on that. And then down at the bottom here it says "books in Braille," search for downloadable Braille files. Click on that and then "visit our card catalog." We'll click on that and it will take us to our card catalog which has all of our books and like everything that we have in our library. So you can't just search for, like, dogs -- I'm going to do that. We'll see. But you can see that's a book that's checked out. That's a Braille book. Audio CD. We don't want any of that. We want the downloadable Braille files and we want them in UEB because that's what our kids are reading now. We do have many Ebay books in our library that you can download but they are, you know, not what our kids are reading these days, it's a different code, so probably don't do it. And also they are transcribed by various volunteers and so the quality varies also. But if you put in DXB UEB or UEB DXB. Include DXB and UEB because that will filter out all of the stuff that's not going to be useful. Now we can do that and we can look for books about dogs. And then you can see we've got several. This is one that there are Ebay versions of the book that you can download, but I don't advise it. But we have UEB, Duxbury and Braille, the Braille-ready format, BRF files. All you have to do is, if it's for Duxbury, just click on that link and it will automatically download the Duxbury file. You can open it and then you'll want to -- and this is transcribed like to the Library of Congress Braille transcribing standards, for the most part, to the best of my abilities. But you'll want to go to "embosser setup" and make sure that the margins are set correctly for whatever embosser you have, that if you don't want to emboss a point that's not checked, you want to make sure you're checking which embosser, the page size is correct. You want to make sure you've got all that correct. And then you can just go ahead and emboss and if it's a multiple-volume -- if the book is multiple Braille volumes, like this one is in four volumes, it's not going to generate the front matter, the title pages and stuff for any volumes after the first. So it only has the front matter for volume one. But you can either, you know, if you know what you're doing, you can make the pages for the rest of the volumes or you can just emboss the whole thing and they bind it and they'll have a book. It may not be perfect but they will have an entire book that's formatted correctly in their hands. And I think that's really important. Does anybody not have access to Duxbury and would you like me to show you how to download a BRF file and open it? Or are there any questions? Because my bit is pretty short. 

>>Kate: Amanda, while we wait for an answer to that, Cindy asked in the chat are there books that are interlined? 

>>Amanda: No. And I don't have Sue, my co-worker and mentor and just Braille goddess would have a better answer for that, but it's tricky. The interlining is tricky and I'm not sure -- like I know we don't have an embosser at this school even that will do interlining in like a very usable way. I think it gets tricky if you're using contractions or other symbols and just the basic letters, you're going to get all that ASCII stuff and it just isn't really readable. But I don't know a lot about interlining, like embossers that interline. So I may be off base. None of these books are set up to be interlined. I don't know if you would do that differently than these are. I have no idea. Sorry. That's not a very good answer to that question. 

>>Kate: Susan asks do we use BRF file for Braille notetaker, like a BrailleNote? 

>>Amanda: I bet you could but you could probably also just use, like, in this case I'm thinking can't you use like a Word file for that? 

>>Kate: Yes. 

>>Amanda: Then you could also -- if you have access to Bookshare, you can download any Word file and you're going to have way more options than what we have on our library right now or we ever will, really. So if you have access to Bookshare and BrailleNotes uses Word files, that would be the way to go. These are formatted correctly and you're not going to even understand -- like, with a BrailleNote you have a limited display so there's no added benefit of reading these files on a BrailleNote unless it's one of those other ones that's like 9 -- I can't remember what it's called but it's like 9 lines. So, yeah. I don't know. Did it sound like anyone needed to know about downloading a BRF? 

>>Kate: It doesn't sound like it, not so far. 

>>Amanda: Yeah, most -- yeah. Most people have Duxbury or Braille 2000.