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Paul Courant’s Blog
From the very beginning, one of the most exciting possibilities of the Google Digitization Project was its potential to open up vast stores of text to a group of users to whom it had previously been inaccessible: people with visual impairments and print disabilities. Before Google (B.G.), students and scholars who wanted access to the contents of a print book had to request that the book be converted to braille, or digitized and OCRed, a special one-at-a-time process that took several weeks. This required lots of advance planning and significantly slowed the pace of study and research for these users. After Google (A.G.), with an increasing amount of the total published content in the world available digitally, that tedious process is no longer necessary. Students and scholars with print disabilities can experience the flow of moving from resource to resource without impediment for the first time ever. Here’s how.
Over the past couple of years, The University of Michigan Library has been working on a project to improve the accessibility of our digitized texts for visually impaired UM students, staff, and faculty. First, the team made accessibility improvements to the standard public interface for the HathiTrust Digital Library (formerly known as MBooks) and developed a text-only interface geared toward people with print disabilities that is optimized for screen reading software. Next, and most important, the Library …