Breadcrumb Trail
Session B: The ATPC: A State-of-The-Art Braille and Electronic Textbook Production Center for Students with Print-Related Disabilities
- Date and Time
- Wednesday, April 23, 8:45 AM to 10:15 AM
- Presenters
-
- Mike Bastine (Director, Alternative Text Production Center (ATPC) of the California Community Colleges)
- Description
The Alternative Text Production Center's Director will present the Center's capabilities to fulfill alternative text requests to support students with print and learning related disabilities. The audience will learn how to save their learning institution time and money for in providing alternative text support to their students. The presentation will provide insight to ATPC's operational infrastructure, products and services. It will highlight how the Center's program is at the forefront of alternative text production to provide national file formats.
This presentation about this unique program, provided to all of the California Community Colleges, will focus on ATPC's ability to "level the playing field" with accessible learning materials for student's with Visual Impairment and/or Learning Disabilities. The program also supports meaningful Braille transcriber training to selected prison populations as a viable vocational career. Literally millions of alternative text pages, hundreds of publishers, and an international product support team have made this production center both distinctive and essential for students with print disabilities.
Being the first publicly funded, system-wide resource dedicated to serving the alternate media needs of the largest post-secondary educational system in the world—The California Community Colleges (CCC). The CCC Chancellor's Office has also permitted the Center to provide Braille products to Non-CCC institutions on a "Fee For Service" basis, a valuable catalog and production resource for all alternate media offices within education.
Since their inception in 2002, the ATPC has processed over 25,000 requests and millions of E-text and Braille pages for students with learning disabilities. The Center has evolved into a highly productive service comprised of a workforce of international transcribers certified by the Library of Congress. It also incorporates the talents of volunteers from across the country, viable state prison partnerships, and a variety of state-of-the-art technologies. This is all managed, day to day, by a dedicated team of highly skilled professionals that have been with the Center since its inception.