Summary of course taken

I am a postgraduate student at Loughborough University in the final year of a Ph.D. on access to books for the print-disabled and securing access to online bookshops and ebooks platforms.

The five main headings of my research on access to books are the kind of access/lack of access people are experiencing so far, relationships between the publishing industry and the print-disabled community, legal reform, ebooks and ebook readers, and finally whether DAISY might help or hinder increased accessibility.

On securing access to online bookshops and ebooks platforms I am interested in the stand-off between those who favour a legal approach based on the W3C’s accessibility guidelines and those who favour an approach based on user testing and input.

Description of strategies used.

I'm a Jaws user, minimum version 8. I stick to Internet Explorer 7 because of a lot of trouble I had with IE 8, though I am slowly getting the hang of Firefox and Web-visum to get round captchas, which has a keystroke to paste the text of the captcha in the relevant edit box.
 
Note-taking. I tried a mainstream PDA with Pocket Hal, but was not successful. The system was too unstable, and I couldn't tell if the system failed because the PDA was going wrong or because of something I did. Battery life on the PDA was also very low. Now I use a Voicenote from Humanware, perfectly adequate and 25 hours battery life.
 
Recording: I tried an Olympus, but the filenames are unclear and can't be spoken aloud on the model I have. I also found it inadequate recording conference proceedings. Next time, on a tip off, I'll try using the Victor Stream with an external microphone.
 
PDF: I've tended to work withPDFs on the whole. I discovered the hard way the importance of selecting 'open entire document' when setting the accessibility options. Sometimes a PDF would just hang when I tried to open it with a screenreader, and my supervisor has a way of getting round it; planning to ask when he gets back early September. I'm currently exploring PDF to Word converters. There seem to be a couple of online convertion tools with reasonably accessible webpages, freepdfconvert.com and pdftoword.com, and I'm enquiring about the accessibility of the converter from hellopdf.com.
 
Skype: Plan to get to grips with Skype to speed up communication, due to problems with emails getting through.