This Solution Makes Textbook Accessibility Easier for Students with Disabilities

“They can go in and set up custom parameters for each of the different books,” says Angel Brown, the director of product marketing for FineReader. “They can change the reading order, they can change the process, extract images they’re not going to use and when the final output comes, it’s exactly what the student needs in terms of curriculum for that class.”

ABBYY Benefits

1) Unmatchable accuracy

While AMAC’s conversion process is effective, Brown says its real magic lies in the ABBYY FineReader software, especially in its text-recognition accuracy.

“It’s a unique approach, and it gives the power back to the student.”
– Christopher Lee, Department Head of AMAC, at Georgia Tech

“The accuracy of the conversion and the text recognition is the highest in the market, at about 99.8 percent,” she says. “It’s very accurate, which means as they’re going through the process of converting the pages, there’s very little work for them to do on the back end…With the accuracy of FineReader, it takes them a short amount of time to go through a 500 page book to make sure everything came out the way it was supposed to, unlike some of the other products on the market that don’t have that level of conversion accuracy.”

2) A variety of vendors

Even though the software is AMAC’s secret weapon, Lee says the organization’s strength is built up from the multiple vendors it works with.

Lee says more vendors means more support and product selection for students with disabilities, and an increased likelihood that accommodation costs will lower.

“The more members we have on, the more leverage we have in bringing down the cost of accommodations,” he says. “We have about 24 pieces of assistive technology that the students are able to download. They get to pick and choose. We have a pretty extensive wiki off of our website and also tied into the student download center, where there’s a user name and password they log in with; they go in, …we walk it through a “decision tree,” and then they come up with some different options on the best assistive technology for them to use. It’s a unique approach, and it gives the power back to the student.”

3) Increased academic success

Even though he does not have full data showing increased retention and graduation rates among students with disabilities, Lee says AMAC is boosting students’ overall academic success.

He says AMAC gets approximately 100,000 text accommodation-requests per year, which is about 60 percent of the U.S. market of textbooks for people with disabilities.

“From a student standpoint, the impact has, we believe, made a big difference in making them more successful in academia as a whole,” Lee says. “We’ve heard that from students through surveys we’ve sent out, and focus groups.”

A Tip to Accommodating Students’ Reading Needs

Before a college invests in an OCR solution like ABBYY FineReader, Brown recommends that decision makers evaluate all potential solutions that are available.

While evaluating, Brown says, colleges are able to make cost-effective technology decisions, and ultimately save money in the long run.

“Budgets are always short to come by in education, so sometimes, what I’m seeing is that people will choose a more affordable solution thinking that’s the route to go, but they wind up investing more because they choose [a solution like] ABBYY later,” she says. “I think the evaluation of the technology during the setup or evaluation process is a critical piece of the process and can be cost-saving in the meantime.”