Data Conversion Laboratory works with a number of organizations doing very interesting things with XML to make information more accessible and available to people with disabilities. One of the more interesting organizations we’ve come across is the not-for-profit Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and in particular the Universal Learning Center (ULC). We recently had an opportunity to interview Rick Bowes, ULC’s Managing Co-Director in order to get his insights on where things are going and what might be possible in the future.

Focusing on the education arena, the not-for-profit CAST seeks to use technology to expand educational opportunities for all students, especially those with disabilities. According to Rick Bowes, Managing Director of CAST’s Universal Learning Center, the organization’s overall mission is “to increase educational opportunities for all children but especially those with disabilities through applying new technology to the learning process.” Bowes, a former publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine and a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing is committed to what CAST calls a Universal Learning Center (ULC).  Bowes has been involved in publishing for more than 28 years as a president of Macmillan New Media and Cadmus Digital Solutions. As a strategic consultant with Bowes & Associates he helped publishers capitalize on electronic publishing and launched a free directory of publications and periodicals on the web called PubList.com. His experience with creating online databases of digital information is what led him to CAST where he is involved in the development and launch of the Universal Learning Center, a digitized directory and database of accessible school curriculum.

CAST Launches Universal Learning Center

The ULC is a web-based resource that “will provide immediate access to digital curricular materials to support a diverse range of K-12 students, including those with disabilities.” The goal of the ULC is to make digital materials widely available to educators and students, and to provide instruction on how they can be used effective to meet student learning needs. The center will consist of a materials locator, an easy-to-use search tool to find digital curricula, a digital content library with centrally-stored downloadable digital materials which will use digital rights management software expected to be available in mid-2002, resources and workshops providing customized instruction, and a Personal Information Manager (PIM) that enables schools to store acquired digital materials, manage resources, and more.

Recognizing the critical need to provide digital content to students with disabilities, CAST will be rolling out a pilot version of its Universal Learning Center. “We’re initially focusing on 9th and 10th grade reading, language arts and social studies,” says Bowes.

XML Plays an Important Role

Presently, the ULC is using in its pilot program, materials kids read in schools that are available in the public domain. These are books that have already been digitized and are available on the web. “We’re embedding in and have developed our own internal DTD that supports education and accessibility tags and so on,” Bowes said of the production work being prepared. “We’ll be able to export out to various different formats using various XSLTs,” he added, although “right now we’re planning to output straight HTML without frames because frames are hard for accessibility.” They are adding navigation tags to public material that is currently untagged. Bowes says that the ULC has “a good value proposition for publishers who want to digitize their text especially those that are using SGML and XML.” Since SGML and XML allow publishers to identify information needed by ULC, it makes it much easier for the materials to be incorporated into the program. The ULC will conduct a campaign to increase awareness in the education community of using digitized materials in the classroom. Materials will be available in unformatted, formatted and structured text, enhanced structured text, and accessible Open eBook. Over time, additional formats will be added.

“Fix the environment so the barriers aren’t there”

The ULC is an outgrowth of CAST’s Universal Design for Learning (UDL) initiative which “digital media can provide multiple representations of content (text, audio, video, etc.) and multiple means of expression.” In addition, “a single enhanced digital document can be configured by software to meet the needs of a wide range of users, thereby eliminating the necessity and cost of multiple versions for multiple constituents.

The traditional view of assistive technology is to provide add-on hardware or add-in software that will enable a person with disabilities to read, hear or access the information needed. The UDL works on the axiom that says “fix the environment so the barriers aren’t there.” Examples of barrier-free environments are, Bowes explains, closed-captioning for the hearing impaired and curb cuts in sidewalks. These accommodations, initially for those with disabilities, have become part of the environment and are used by all people. For example, in airport waiting areas mounted televisions have closed-captioning capability so that the person watching can “hear” over the din of loudspeakers amid a cacophony of environmental sounds. A business person wheeling a briefcase cart can use the curb cuts to cross the street without having to lift the cart over barriers.

Many barriers to learning can be reduced by reproducing textbooks with digital versions. Explains Bowes “if students can’t get the materials to participate in the classroom they fall behind and don’t test well.” Of the approximate 5.5 million students with disabilities covered under the federal guidelines that provide for academic accommodations through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975 and its amendment in 1997 Bowes says that “while the needs of low vision or blind students are currently being addressed by Braille, audio and other media the remaining students with disabilities can benefit greatly from new digital resources like those we are focusing on.” The ULC strives to bring accessible digital materials to the student population with disabilities, students with dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, learning disabilities and neurological impairments. Studies by the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services of the U.S. Department of Education show that since the government has allocated services to children with disabilities more of them have graduated from high school and successfully completed coursework in colleges and universities.

Digital versions of textbooks, reference books, tests, workbooks, worksheets, films and videos are part of the panoply of possibilities. Bowes clarifies this by saying that “you can highlight the text like you would in a word processor, then work with it to change the size, read it, read it in different voices and in different speeds.”

For publishers the ULC will provide a delivery system that they can use to respond to new accessibility requirements that qualify for state adoptions and that fulfill state and federal mandates. The system will provide a searchable relational database of metadata about digital content in the ULC, publishers’ and other repositories; host a secure XML-based repository containing accessible curriculum resources; provide a service for translating traditional publishing formats (e.g. Quark) into accessible XML; and various features providing security and access control to assure proper use by ULC users.  

Enhancing Accessibility for Corporate Websites and Schools

CAST has several products that have been on the market for a while. It developed the popular and free Bobby for corporate websites, intranets and others. Bobby is a web cop of sorts that analyzes web pages for accessibility problems and teaches designers how to correct them. In order to become “Bobby-approved” a website must meet the following standards: provide text equivalents for all images and multimedia; ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without it; identify headers for data tables and make line-by-line reading sensible for layout tables; provide summaries of graphs and charges; identify document language and any changes to it; organize content logically and clearly such as with headings, list elements, links and navigation bars; provide alternative content for features like applets or plug-ins that may not be supported.

Together with Scholastic Inc., one of the leading children’s book publishers, CAST co-developed WiggleWorks, one of the very early multimedia products that was mainstreamed in education. WiggleWorks allows children to read, write, speak, and record themselves reading. In addition, they can creatively revise the books, print them, and share their work with family and friends. WiggleWorks is a tool for teaching literacy skills to diverse learners. The program enables teachers to work with children who have varying degrees of learning abilities within the same classroom. It assists students with story awareness, word recognition, phonics, writing and comprehension and oral reading.

In addition, CAST provides a host of opportunities for all students especially those students with disabilities to not only assist in the learning process but to enlighten them on the way technology can transform and inspire an individual to achieve the highest goals.

For more information on CAST and its products, the ULC or Bobby go to the CAST websites at: www.cast.org, www.ulc.cast.org, www.cast.org/bobby.

Click here to read about CAST’s Bobby on CNET’s Digital Dispatch.

More information on Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) is available at www.dclab.com