The AccessText Network Is Gone. What Now?

On April 1st, 2024, the Georgia Institute of Technology announced that the AccessText Network was finished. Shortly thereafter, the service’s website disappeared.

The sudden loss of this resource left school administrators scrambling for accessible textbooks, and with a summer term right around the corner!

Whether you relied on AccessText or you’re just looking for a better way to bring accessible course materials to students with disabilities, you probably have questions about where to go from here. Find answers to the following questions below:

• What was the AccessText Network?
• How did AccessText work?
• Is AccessText gone for good?
• What’s the best AccessText alternative?
• How do you make digital texts accessible?

As you work to fill the gap left by AccessText, you can always turn to ReadSpeaker for help. We offer reading tools and text to speech (TTS) natively in your learning management system (LMS), online, or anywhere else your students learn. These solutions go a long way toward meeting your institution’s accessibility goals.

With that in mind, here’s what’s going on with AccessText.

What was the AccessText Network?

The AccessText Network was a partnership between four stakeholders:

• The Association of American Publishers, (opens in a new tab) which sought a way to provide accessible digital formats of textbooks;
• Participating publishers, who agreed to provide digital textbooks through the AccessText system;
• The Center for Inclusive Design & Innovation (opens in a new tab) at Georgia Tech, directed by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, which administered the service, and…
• Participating post-secondary institutions, which used AccessText to provide accessible textbooks to students with disabilities.

AccessText was also a digital platform that facilitated the distribution of accessible learning materials, namely, electronic editions of print textbooks.

The platform is what went down in April 2024. As for the partnership, that remains up in the air as we publish.

How did AccessText work?

The AccessText Network’s core service was delivering digital copies of print textbooks. By all accounts, the process was simple, and looked something like this:

1. Students with disabilities would request electronic texts from the institution’s Disability Service Provider (DSP) or equivalent staff.
2. The DSP would log onto the AccessText app and make the request.
3. The publisher of the textbook would approve the request, then send the DSP a download link.
4. If there was no e-book available, the publisher would send permission for the DSP to scan the textbook.

This act of digitization wasn’t enough to greatly improve textbook accessibility, however. It was just the first step.

With AccessText, it was usually up to the receiving institution to take that next step: creating an audiobook with text to speech (TTS), producing a braille document, enlarging the digital text, or providing focus tools like page masks, for example.

Is AccessText gone for good?

There’s a chance we’ll only need temporary solutions for the current absence of AccessText. While Georgia Tech may have ceased its work on the project, the Association of American Publishers says it remains committed to the cause.

An April 2024 announcement (opens in a new tab) from the industry group states that:

“The Association of American Publishers (AAP) remains deeply committed to supporting efforts to meet the needs of individuals with disabilities and we are assessing how best to expeditiously restore the [AccessText Network] service.”

As we publish, AccessText remains unavailable. But it appears that the Association of American Publishers is trying to bring it back, in what form, who can say?

What’s the best AccessText alternative?

The AccessText Network’s core task was to deliver digital versions of print textbooks quickly. While no service is exactly the same as AccessText, that is, no one offers the exact same list of participating publishers, there are a few solutions disability service providers can use to make sure their students get more accessible learning materials.

These include the following options:

1. Get e-books directly from publishers. Textbook publishers are offering more and more titles as e-books. It’s way more likely that a text property is available as a digital file today than it was at AccessText’s high point in 2018. If you don’t see an e-book format available, contact the publisher to see if they sell scanned copies.
2. Scan course materials yourself. If your office of accessibility services has the staffing, you may be able to create your own digital versions of print materials. (This is a great job for student workers, for the record!) Just be sure to get the publisher’s permission before disseminating scanned texts.
3. Outsource your e-text generation. Many schools simply don’t have the resources to create digital materials in-house. Sometimes these tasks can be outsourced. In fact, none other than the Georgia Tech Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation offers e-text generation services, (opens in a new tab) starting at 14 cents per page for PDF files (and going up from there).

As we mentioned, though, getting a textbook into a digital format is just the first step toward greater accessibility.

A truly accessible text depends on the individual reading it: Does the student have a vision impairment, a learning disability, attention challenges, or other barriers that could be removed by changing the manner of presentation? The helpful tool will be different for each.

To support accessibility for your students, then, you need tools that change the way readers experience textbooks in a variety of ways. That’s where ReadSpeaker can help.

How do you make digital texts accessible?

Every student has different needs. According to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), educators should meet these needs by offering choice over the means of presentation.

The best way to do this is to offer a set of accessibility tools within the student’s existing learning environment. ReadSpeaker’s enhanced TTS solutions integrate directly into all major learning platforms, so students don’t have to open another app or window to access the tools.

Recommended accessibility features for college learners include:

• Text to speech (TTS), which makes any digital text into an audiobook instantly
• Simultaneous text highlighting with TTS, which can improve attention and text/speech association
• Digital screen masks and reading rulers, key focus tools
• Text adjustment tools, including large print, text color, and font choice

For scanned print documents, be sure to choose an accessibility tool that includes optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Without OCR, your TTS system may struggle to interpret scanned documents, or even skip words within images. Optical character recognition supports accessibility for scanned paper documents, images, photographed text, and other legacy materials.

Finally, it helps to give students the option to download audio files of their textbooks (or any other document). That way, they can listen offline: meeting the widespread preference for studying while driving, cooking, exercising, or whatever else today’s busy students do.

ReadSpeaker docReader offers all these tools and more, including advanced OCR that allows users to copy, annotate, and listen to scanned documents (including words within images). docReader brings these capabilities to all major LMSs. And while docReader supports all major e-book formats (.RTF.EPUB.PDF), it also works with all Microsoft Office and Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice files.

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ReadSpeaker TextAid, meanwhile, includes these features plus writing tools like dictation (speech to text) and predictive auto-complete.

TextAid also includes an Exam Mode, which allows instructors to speech-enable tests while removing features that may give an unintended advantage (like translation or the integrated dictionary).

ReadSpeaker’s accessibility tools won’t replace the AccessText Network. But once you get your texts into a digital format, these WCAG 2.2-compliant TTS solutions allow students to customize their own experiences. That empowers the user to construct their own accessible experience, with or without AccessText.