EasyConverter Case Study: Valencia Community College in Florida embraces AltFormat

EasyConverter offers students the opportunity to realize their goals

Valencia Community College has during its 40 years evolved to become a true innovative leader in higher education with a national reputation for teaching excellence. With four campuses and two centers in the Orlando area, Valencia is now the third largest of Florida's 28 community colleges, teaching more than 50,000 students a year.

Valencia Community College takes very seriously its responsibility to provide universal access to education for all of its students. To this end EasyConverter was seen as part of this philosophy and was recently installed, alongside Dolphin Publisher and EasyProducer, into the college's available resources in order to have a complete repertoire of DAISY and alternative format production tools.

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Julie Balassa, Assistant Director of the Office for Students with Disabilities and responsible for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services and Assistive Technology at Valencia Community College, commented; "Before we installed EasyConverter, we used a variety of alternative format production tools to create even the most basic alternative formats, an unnecessarily time consuming and labor-intensive process"

This time consuming and labor-intensive process was compounded due to the fact that students were requesting a number of differing alternative formats, including navigable MP3 files, DAISY, Braille and large print (which involved staff spending a lot of valuable time stood in front of a photocopier).

The benefits of EasyConverter's ability to quickly and accurately provide a range of alternative formats (Braille, Large Print, MP3, DAISY and plain text) from a variety of input files (scanned documents, word, PDF, NIMAS and HTML), are already being felt by faculty members and students alike, as Julie explains; "Students having the ability to have faster access to required course materials maximizes their opportunity to work to their full potential....I know the faculty feel relieved when they know they can devote time to all students instead of having to work intensively with one student because of access issues."

Going forward Valencia Community College has a simple dream and EasyConverter will significantly contribute to this dream in order to make it a reality; "Our continued hope is that EasyConverter will enable us to provide the requested alternative formats in a timely and effective manner, and that this in turn will play an integral role in enabling our students to maximize their potential and to realize their educational goals at Valencia and beyond."

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