Lauren Lee | Feb 3, 2025 - Atlanta, GA

Imagine the stress of being a blind freshman on a college campus. There are the usual stressors of college life, like new friends, new environments, and being away from home for the first time. But one of the additional stressors can hit home when that student goes into a classroom and realizes “I can’t read my textbook, what do I do?”

Enter the accessibility champions in CIDI’s E-Text department. 

“My team takes inaccessible materials like physical textbooks and PowerPoints, and then makes the text navigable for a screen reader. We add bookmarks, tags, and text descriptions to images so that students’ screen readers can navigate the content,” explains Andrea Antrim, Digital Media Accessibility Specialist in the E-Text unit. 

Making any document accessible to a screen reader can be a tricky, labor-intensive process. Scanning a textbook into a PDF in the usual way can result in content that is incomprehensible to a screen reader. 

“When a student orders a textbook to be made accessible for a class they are taking, we’ll buy the book, chop the spine off, and make a scanned PDF,” says Nia Lassiter, E-Text Digital Media Specialist. “After, we run the scanned PDF through an Optical Character Recognition software, which makes it real, selectable text you can run your cursor over.”

But the people they help go beyond just those visually impaired. “Our work benefits students who are blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, have ADHD, dyslexia, mobility issues, and so much more,” says Deanna Mansfield, E-Text Production Supervisor. 

And the E-text unit can assist more than just students. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 makes it so that the federal government must also make documents accessible for people with disabilities. This is often colloquially called “Section 508 Compliance.” The work that CIDI’s E-Text team does goes beyond compliance by incorporating accessibility research and user testing in their work.

It’s more than just compliance—it’s a calling. E-Text Manager Valerie Morrison says, “Students with print-related disabilities have no access to many of the textbooks and course readers that faculty assign in their courses. By providing accessible versions of these materials, students can succeed in their studies.”

Lassiter agrees. “The work we do is more than just providing a book to a student; it’s allowing someone to not be blocked out of education in general.”

The E-Text unit makes sure that students have the means to succeed in their studies, regardless of ability. Through their meticulous work, the textbooks, PowerPoints, Word documents, and even graphic novels assigned in class are available to every student who needs them.