{"id":4432,"date":"2012-01-17T21:12:28","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T01:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=4432"},"modified":"2012-01-17T21:12:28","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T01:12:28","slug":"brief-note-on-apples-garageband-for-ebooks-and-accessibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4432","title":{"rendered":"Brief note on Apple&#8217;s &#8220;GarageBand for ebooks&#8221; and accessibility"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is what can happen when you&#8217;re at the end of a long day and idly respond to the news on Twitter: you get quoted in a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/epicenter\/2012\/01\/apple-education-jobs\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader\">Wired piece about Apple&#8217;s anticipated announcement this week of &#8230; something ebooksy<\/a>, 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/section508.gov\">section 508 standards<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>For the record, I don&#8217;t hold myself out as a special education policy expert. I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, I think my instincts are correct that a crucial issue for electronic texts&#8217; 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&#8211;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&#8230; and like many, I hope it will improve accessibility of future electronic texts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is what can happen when you&#8217;re at the end of a long day and idly respond to the news on Twitter: you get quoted in a\u00a0Wired piece about Apple&#8217;s anticipated announcement this week of &#8230; something ebooksy, very possibly a tool to compose electronic texts in much simpler ways than is possible now. Or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-19u","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4435,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4432\/revisions\/4435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}