This is what can happen when you’re at the end of a long day and idly respond to the news on Twitter: you get quoted in a Wired piece about Apple’s anticipated announcement this week of … something ebooksy, very possibly a tool to compose electronic texts in much simpler ways than is possible now. Or it happened to me as I thought about educational technology and accessibility, and especially how difficult it is to make AV media easily accessible. How many institutions held themselves to section 508 standards of accessibility? Would the existence of composition tools cut any time off captioning? I tapped out a few comments, which Wired writer Tim Carmody picked up on.
For the record, I don’t hold myself out as a special education policy expert. I’m fascinated by special education policy, have conducted research in the history of special education (including policy), and accessibility is something I worried about in the early incarnations of Flash and other at-first-not-accessible-by-a-longshot display technologies. But in no way am I the gravitas in the room on this subject.
On the other hand, I think my instincts are correct that a crucial issue for electronic texts’ adoption will be accessibility broadly speaking. Part of this is related to tools around sensory impairments but more generally around the affordances a particular electronic text has–the ways a student could grab the material and do something with it, whether highlighting, looking up terms, taking notes, etc. I will be very curious to see what Apple announces… and like many, I hope it will improve accessibility of future electronic texts.