ACCESS Committee Report ACCESS is finally ready to be put on the CTEVH website. It is done with one exception: The Technology articles will have to be added. The current ones need to be extensively revised and new ones will be added. The articles needing revision are Books on Diskette, Computer Access, and Electronic Reading Machines (the latter two are still in the book because I corrected old information and it is a start). The articles I anticipate adding will be are in the area of: Downloading Books From the Web, Electronic Notetakers, E-mail, and Internet Use. The specialist working on these assures me they will be done by January, 2006. Since it has taken so long to get the 4th edition of ACCESS “published”, I did not wait for the book to be completed. Liz Barclay and Theresa Duncan assisted me in getting the rest of ACCESS completed. The difficulty in redoing it was that almost all of the original contributors and those who offered to help did not respond and did not participate in the project. One exception was Mike Cole, who rewrote 4 excellent articles. Thanks also to the Orientation and Mobility teachers at CSB who wrote an extensive article on Orientation and Mobility. We made minor changes to the format of the ACCESS. We switched the order of the article and address sections. We added websites to the articles, where possible. According to suggestions from Jerry Kuns, a technology specialist at CSB, we made changes that make it more user friendly to blind users: only capitalizing first letters of titles, rather than whole title (less clutter); paragraphs in block format rather than using indentations. Address section will include name, address, phone number, and web address when available. We have eliminated Director name on organizations (changes too often), and fax numbers. You can get that information from the website or a phone call. I deleted 27 addresses in the address section, either because the company is no longer in existence, does not serve individuals in California, or is a religious organization. I added 62 new addresses. These all reference articles in the book. Additional websites were embedded in articles that we revised. More addresses will be added with the completion of the Technology sections. Christy will put the new addition of ACCESS on our website. Each article in the table of contents will be a link that takes you directly to the article (with Christy’s expertise). In the foreword, I have stated that ACCESS can be ordered in Braille or on disk through the CTEVH office. I can provide the disks . Someone else will have to put ACCESS into a Braille format and emboss it if requested. Respectfully submitted by:
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