(upbeat music)
- (Narrator) Welcome to The Accessible Learning Experience
where we help you turn learning barriers
into learning opportunities.
In part two of our three part series
focusing on the history of accessibility at CAST,
CAST co-founder Skip Stahl picks up the story
in the mid 1990s,
when CAST becomes more involved in the world of policy
in order to have a broader impact with initiatives such as
the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard,
or NIMAS. Skip and David speak to the consensus building
and collaboration that was needed
to bring a range of stakeholders to the table
in order to have these efforts,
which continue to have a significant impact
to this very day be successful.
Here's AEM Center Director Cynthia Curry,
with part two of our conversation with CAST co-founders,
Skip Stahl and David Rose.
- (Cynthia) Skip,
when CAST developed UDL, one of the linchpins
was to provide multiple representations of information
for learners, including educational materials.
At that time, which was before the widespread adoption
of classroom technology,
a one size fits all curriculum of primarily print materials
was the norm.
Tell us about how materials were being adapted at that time,
and ultimately the evolution
of what became the National Instructional Materials
Accessibility Standard.
- (Skip) David had mentioned pioneers and our work
with individual students who were struggling
because of sensory, physical attentional,
cognitive learning challenges.
We were applying technology in many ways to individuals
like a prosthetic to extend their capabilities
in ways that they would be impossible for them
to achieve otherwise.
And as we did that work,
we learned, we changed our orientation,
began to develop a sense that it was
a one size fits all curriculum
and the materials associated with it
that were the major problem.
And so we began to do conference presentations
and began to be contacted by local school districts
who wanted to gain from our knowledge
and the work that we were doing.
And towards the late eighties
and emerging into the middle nineties,
we did more outreach, professional development outreach,
conference presentation outreach.
And as we did that work,
we began to discover that something
was happening new in classrooms and schools
around the country.
And this was predominantly in kindergarten through,
you know, senior year of high school.
So we were working in K-12 settings for the most part.
And what was triggering some of that change was
desktop computer technology was getting more efficient,
more powerful and more economical.
And in particular, the capability of actually
scanning print pages, textbook pages,
mimeograph sheets, et cetera.
Scanning those with a flatbed scanner and changing them
into a digital version that could be manipulated.
That technology became economically accessible
to a variety of schools.
And so in many cases,
those of us who were out doing a lot of
either presentations or professional development,
realized that in many circumstances,
the same textbook might be being scanned
in a library or a classroom in order to make it accessible,
as a digital version, might simultaneously
be being scanned,
in a thousand classrooms across the country
because students who needed to have a braille version,
if the version was digital,
could be readily translated page by page
into braille for that student
in a just in time mode.
Because national and local regional production,
large-scale braille production was still
and continues to be quite slow and costly.
And it occurred to us that there needed to be
that this was a incredible amount of redundancy,
lot of wasted time and effort,
and that the efforts to create accessible versions
were falling on the people who actually
were the customers as opposed to the producers.
At the same time...
So we're seeing an uptick in the adoption
of desktop scanning technology at the local school level,
either classroom or library,
at the same time, publishers were being requested
to submit various digital formats for the production,
primarily for the production of braille
in about half the states in the country.
So what we were hearing from the publishing community
was that they might be requested
to produce a certain type of structured Rich Text Format
or RTF file for one state or a ASCII A-S-C-I-I text,
plain text format for another state
or a Microsoft Word document for the third state
or all three.
And each of those productions of alternate formats,
digital formats was costing a publisher
somewhere between three and $5,000
every time they had to make that production,
because keep in mind the curriculum publishers workflow
at that time was print and not digital.
It was designed to actually publish,
the final product was going to be print.
So it was all oriented towards print production.
So producing a digital format for distribution
was a side endeavor that they often
hired a third-party entity to do working
with their own file.
So it was incredibly cost prohibitive.
Every time a state asked for another format
and some states would ask for multiple formats.
So here you have these two different populations.
You had the consumers who were struggling
to acquire accessible materials on the one hand
and doing it on an ad hoc basis, locality by locality.
And then you had the producers,
the very producers of the same materials
who were struggling with exactly the same problem
on a large scale situation.
And none of those entities were really talking
with one another.
And out of that,
the blind low vision advocacy organizations,
a group of kind of a coalesced
group of advocates for blind low vision
created a solutions forum
that involved a lot of entities to try and come up
with some national approach
that would eliminate the redundancy
that would address the publisher's concerns
that would address the customer concerns.
So those of us who were doing professional development
from CAST around what we had learned in the labs,
we were existing within this kind of confluence
of concern that was growing at a national level.
In the mid nineties, I was working
with the Concord New Hampshire school district.
They had built a school-based network
that all their schools and classrooms
were connected with a wired computer network,
which was astounding at that period of time
because it just didn't exist elsewhere.
And they had a vision that they could digitize
in their libraries,
textbooks for students with disabilities,
who needed these under both special education
and civil rights law as qualified learners
who had special needs,
that they could create an economy of scale
using their network and create a repository
of accessible instructional materials and that they would,
and then teachers could request that those materials
be downloaded via the network to local computers
for students to be able to use.
So for a period of about four or five years,
I was consulting with that district
as they put considerable energy
and expertise into creating a centralized solution.
And even though it was glitchy at times
and not perfect and slow and errors occurred, et cetera,
et cetera, this centralized approach
was the solution that was needed and that we needed to
expand this approach to a national model.
And at the very same time CAST again,
under the direction and expertise of Chuck Hitchcock
was exploring, applying for a federal grant.
There was a federal competition out of the Office
of Special Education programs.
U.S. Department of Education, that was entitled something
like the National Center
on Accessing the General Curriculum.
And that title immediately attracted us and said, oh,
here's a funding opportunity
of the U.S. Department of Education
is paying attention to what's going on in the country.
They're paying attention to the blind, low-vision
advocacy groups that are formed in active coalition.
They're paying attention to publishers
who are complaining to the U.S. Department of Education
that there's no commercial value to the publishers
to create braille.
And yet they're having to produce all these alternate files
that are costing money
and can't the federal government do something.
And then they're hearing complaints from consumers
and customers in classrooms.
CAST applied for the National Center on Accessing
the General Curriculum, or NCAC,
as we subsequently referred to it and won that competition.
It was our first major federal grant,
Chuck directed that project.
I was still doing a lot of professional development
and I would, kind of annoy Chuck
with my constant refrain of there's a lot of redundancy
out there about textbooks, they're being scanned locally
and publishers that are complaining and we should figure out
some way within the context of this center
to address some of these issues.
And so one of the things we had,
was we had some additional supplemental funds
that were held back by the department to be used
for maybe special projects.
So we proposed that we would convene a group of individuals
from all these different,
the advocacy groups from the publishing community
and from the consumer groups,
we would convene these folks together
to see if we could come up with a solution.
And that was known affectionately
as the National File Format Technical Panel.
And we started meeting, I'd look my dates
around 2002, 2003, maybe 2004, over a period of a year.
I think we had three meetings and the goal
was to see if we could come up with a solution
or at least a proposed solution to the problem
that the publishers and the disability advocates
and the consumers themselves all shared.
Everybody was dealing with the same issue
from a different perspective.
And I'll never forget one of the first meetings,
probably the first meeting we held in Washington
of the National File Format Technical Panel
was sitting at a table.
We did some breakout groups with various individuals
and experts in various disability areas.
And I was seated at a table with two folks
from National Braille Press who were blind
and two folks from the National Association
of Learning Disabilities
and some folks from the National Association for the Deaf.
And we started talking about formats and access.
And one of the folks from National Braille Press
who was quite definitive in his opinions
said, look, the answer here is, this is very simple problem.
I don't know why we're all gathered together here.
And we know exactly what we need
in order to solve this problem.
What we need is text and digital texts
and text is the answer.
And across the table,
someone from the National Council of Learning Disabilities
said text is not the answer.
Text is the problem. That exchange for me was,
kind of an undeniable affirmation
that what was someone's access route
was someone else's barrier
and that we needed to create alternatives,
multiple alternatives,
so that we eliminated as many barriers as we possibly could.
Those deliberations over the course of that year,
we actually came to resounding agreements.
There was a file format and extensible markup language
or XML file format that was proposed called DAISY.
And we ended up coming up with a subset
of the DAISY extensible markup language XML format
that we referred to as the
National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard,
or NIMAS.
And at the time of those deliberations,
the agreement as to what the NIMAS consisted of
was a voluntary agreement across the publishing community,
the advocacy community and the end-user community.
And as that kind of voluntary,
as those voluntary discussions were going on
towards the final meetings,
the Individuals with Disabilities Act was,
Education Act, sorry,
Individual with Disabilities Education Act
was being reauthorized.
And a number of the people in the National File Format group
who were very knowledgeable policy folks
realized if they could get a NIMAS mandate
into the reauthorization of IDEA
and not have to promote the NIMAS specification
or standard forward as a separate piece of legislation,
that its chances of passing
were just accelerated enormously.
And so a subset of the National File Format Technical Panel
and other advocates lobbied
various members of Congress to include the NIMAS language
and the NIMAS agreement in IDEA as a mandate.
And that created all sorts of subsequent challenges
because those folks who had agreed to the format,
were agreeing to a voluntary format.
Now what was being pushed forward was a mandated format.
So there were all sorts of kind of side adjustments
that needed to be addressed.
Copyright law, textbooks contain images and graphs
and charts and other elements
that publishers contract out to third parties for.
So there had to be some mechanism for doing that.
There also had to be a clarity
as to which students would be eligible
to receive these materials
so that they weren't distributed kind of willy nilly
to every student and undermine the market model.
So there were just,
even though this was the exact right thing to do,
of pulling what had been a voluntary standard
or a specification into a mandatory legislative statement
for states and districts, it brought with it
a range of challenges that needed to be addressed.
And so that was the NIMAs portion of the legislation.
IDEA was resulted in just multiple other meetings
and conversations and ultimately co-operations
where everybody said, yep, this is a solvable problem.
And it turned out that that was the case.
- (Cynthia) Skip, as a direct result of CAST's role
in the creation of NIMAS and its inclusion in IDEA
you were awarded two of the first three centers
that the Department of Education established
to support the implementation of the NIMAS specification.
And since then the department has awarded to CAST
four consecutive grants related
to the provision of accessible materials and technologies.
Describe how the work has evolved over time.
- (Skip) I think that in the National File Format Technical Panel
meeting was really the crucible
for us learning about consensus building.
In the first meeting,
I was struck by the fact that there were probably
35 representatives of stakeholder organizations in the room.
Many of whom would under other circumstances
have not agreed to be in the same hotel lobby
as one another.
And a lot of concern,
there were a concern, for example,
from a number of the blind advocacy organizations
that bringing in the needs of students
with learning disabilities, for example,
would water down an effort that had been so aggressively
and effectively spearheaded
by blind and low vision advocates.
And yet, on the other hand,
we realized that the number of blind students in the country
was quite small in terms of thinking about,
kind of political power and need,
and that there were potentially in the K-12 space,
10,000 blind students who needed braille.
And that that amount was not going
to constitute a market for the commercial publishers,
nor was it likely to get their attention in the way
that the 2.5 or 2.6 million students
with attentional and learning disabilities might.
And so just it became clear to us that
it was important to listen to the concerns of each group
and then point out to them that things that were
their closely held concerns and beliefs
could in fact be magnified by joining together.
And that the mantra of better together was the absolute one.
And so through the course of the two or three, three,
I think it was three meetings
of the National File Format Technical Panel
and the subsequent there were subsequent work groups
that were developed out of that.
And a lot of ongoing weekly communication among members.
It went from being a somewhat abrasive initial meeting.
And it was like sitting in a room of people
made of sandpaper and they were all rubbing up
against each other.
And that sandpaper disappeared
through the subsequent meetings
and through the end of the year.
And you could almost, you could certainly see it,
it was palpable in the room.
And as the work kind of wound down, people were saying,
we need to stay together
and make these collaborations persist
because even though this particular task,
the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard
had been addressed and identified,
there were other issues obviously,
copyright was an ongoing issue.
How were intellectual property holders, the rights,
the individuals who hold the rights
to that intellectual property, how were they going to be?
How were their materials going to be protected?
How were they going to be compensated
if some of those materials were being given away for free?
What was the balance in those discussions?
I think it was also on the flip side,
was talking to the consumer end and saying
that there's inherent cost in the production,
distribution, storage and cataloging
of alternate format accessible materials.
And we have to figure out a way to compensate people who are
doing that.
So just because the need is there
just because it's essential that students
have these materials doesn't mean that they can simply
be acquired, there's no cost associated
with their production.
So how do we address that cost?
And that these are for the most part private companies
that are producing these materials.
Are they going to be compelled to do something
that's going to affect their bottom line?
Or can we create an environment
where there's a purchasing exchange
There's a trusted relationship
between producer and consumer.
So I think that we realized early on in,
in that NIMAS was really about collaboration
and it was in many ways,
it was an eye opening kind of experience for us at CAST.
I remember we used to do annual retreat,
so we'd have a day of retreat to get together
CAST as an organization,
starting from when we were quite small,
of you know, 12 or 15 people.
And then continuing through the present day
when we're a little more than that.
And we would get together and talk
about what, what our vision was
and what we were going to invest in, in the future.
And I remember one meeting probably
around the year 2000 as a retreat
where we got together and the issue of education policy
arose. Would we ever be involved in education policy?
And there was a resounding no, no, no, that's not.
We don't have any expertise in that.
We have no, there's nothing that is likely
to draw us into that.
We're really clinicians, we're interested in research
and publishing and presenting and professional development.
There's no room in there for policy.
And four years later,
all the work I was doing was educational policy
around accessible instructional materials
or accessible educational materials.
And so it was a profound change for the organization.
As David had mentioned,
we realized that we could gain through partnerships,
things that were simply impossible to gain on our own,
and that the end benefit was we could take steps
towards changing the way the world works
with those partnerships and that those opportunities
would likely be denied to us
if those partnerships didn't exist.
And that the only way for an effective,
for partnership to be effective
was through some sort of consensus building
where you acknowledged that the person
you were talking with and needed to support your effort
may have a totally different perspective
on what was important to them.
And that you needed to acknowledge that perspective,
incorporate it in some way in the decision-making.
And then that allowed you to move forward.
And that in fact was really just an extension of the type
of collaborative work that CAST
had already committed to within the organization.
We were committed to collaborative partnership efforts,
everything from exploration of new prototypes
and research to publication.
And so taking that commitment to collaboration
externally helped move the work of the organization forward
and persists to this day.
That if you look at the work of particularly the AEM Center,
there's a sense of trusted intermediary
amongst the consumer, the Disability Advocacy Community,
the federal government who funds the AEM Center
and the publishing community where AEM Center decisions
and kind of investments have an impact.
And so each of those groups has a different end goal
in mind, but they're all dealing with the same issues
on a day-to-day basis.
And it's important enough for the AEM Center to be at CAST,
to be skilled at consensus building and collaboration.
- (David) I just wanted to add one thing that
in this regard, I think Skip captured it accurately.
There's a great phrase that we used all the time
when we were thinking ahead.
And the phrase is, there's nothing you can't accomplish
if you don't need the credit.
And I think one of the things that we really tried to do
was to spread the credit around
and to work with people rather than to own it as CAST alone.
In fact, one of the tensions with our board
was the board wanted us to copyright
the term Universal Design for Learning and to own it.
And so on.
Thinking as a commercial matter, it was a sellable thing.
And then everybody had to come to us and all that.
And we realized, no, actually we want people,
all sorts of people to be invested
in Universal Design for Learning.
And we knew that a way to kill it and to marginalize it
was to say, it's CAST and only CAST
does Universal Design for Learning.
So we consistently rejected the
we need all the credit kind of position.
I think that was central to what we've been able
to accomplish, is that we didn't ever feel
we were doing it alone.
I have to say one other thing that came up
when Skip was talking.
I love that too, that incident.
There were a couple of times when the organization
shifted completely and one of them
was around the policy thing,
you know, just like he said, we literally put on a board,
we don't do policy.
Because it was like a relief.
There's something we don't do.
And I was once introduced by Chris Dede
who is a big educational technology leader at Harvard.
And he was introducing me and he said, David works at CAST.
He said, CAST has always struck me like a junkyard dog.
And I was like, oh my God, where's this going?
And he said, they've got their teeth around something.
And they just are not going to release it,
except if they find a better way,
they'll release it in a minute and try that.
And I thought it was a good image.
So like we were doing okay,
but we weren't getting at something central
as Skip was saying.
So then we said, okay, we'll do policy then.
And I think that was also central to CAST's
continuing in which I say viability
was that we would every once in a while go,
you know what, and sometimes we're going to actually
do things that we didn't think we'd ever do
to get a new grip on it.
So I like the image of us being a junkyard dog
that cooperates with other junkyard dogs.
- (Narrator) In part three, Skip and David reflect
on how the history of accessibility at CAST
informs the organization's work today.
Thanks for tuning into this episode
of The Accessible Learning Experience
brought to you
by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials
at CAST.
You can find us on the web at aem.cast.org.
There you'll find show notes with links
to all of the resources mentioned on each episode.
Thanks again for listening.
And remember accessibility is everyone's responsibility.
(upbeat music)
The contents of this podcast were developed
under a cooperative agreement
with the U.S. Department of Education.
However, those contents do not necessarily
represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education.
And you should not assume endorsement
by the federal government.