Ablenet+and+Accessible+Books

I wanted to share an idea with all of you regarding a new twist to an already existing curriculum. I had the great pleasure of meeting Mary Sagsetter from Ablenet and she showed me some of their materials, **MeVille to WeVille** and the **Star Reporter**. Both very nice programs and best of all they are written for students with severe disabilities. Both of these curriculum units use a variety of books from a variety of authors. We have since decided to purchase both of these programs for the schools that I work in. However, I was still stuck on the idea that the traditional book was not going to cut it for all of my students. I asked Mary to send me the book list for the two programs and was in the process of ordering additional books that we could adapt for our students with page fluffers and laminated cut out pictures when it occurred to me that I had a wonderful resource. Joe!!!!! I emailed Joe from Accessible Book Collection and being the wonderful man that he is, he agreed to scan the books on the list as long as they are appropriate for scanning and provided that he can find them. So Joe is going to start scanning and I am going to start Clicking in Clicker 5 and we should end up with some wonderful and truly accessible books for our students to go with our new curriculum. For individuals not familiar with Clicker, Clicker 5 allows our students to read the text, read the text that they know and click on individual words to receive text-to-speech, or have all of text on a page read to them. Students can also record themselves reading or use their AAC device to record into the microphone within the book. It is switch accessible and we can increase the font and use a high color contrast for our students with visual difficulties. We can provide all of this support through one template (UDL) which is available through this wiki

Linda Wilson has also joined the initiative and is going to start creating some of these books for these units using Intellipics which will allow us to reach out to a wider audience.

If anyone else is using the Ablenet products and would like to get involved with this initiative, please send me a message. dbrodbeck@aces.org

In addition to the books from that are incorporated into the Ablenet curriculums, we are in the process of continuing to format other titles from the Accessible Book Collection for students as well. Please check out the other pages on the wiki for additional information as we would love to have you join us. . Enjoy the day

Darlene Brodbeck .