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RECORDED TEXTBOOKS GO DIGITAL, OFFER UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS TO INFORMATION FOR CALIFORNIA STUDENTS WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS, LEARNING DISABILITIES

August 20, 2002, Los Angeles, California - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Students who are visually impaired or who have learning disabilities will have unprecedented access to the contents of textbooks and other educational materials with the September 3, 2002 nationwide release of digitally recorded textbooks on CD from Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic® (RFB&D®). An inaugural collection of 6,000 digitally recorded educational titles, ranging from the Harry Potter series to Systems of Psychotherapy: a Transtheoretical Analysis on the graduate level, will be added to RFB&D’s unique collection of 91,000 accessible textbooks — the largest collection of its kind in the world.

For more than 50 years, RFB&D, a nonprofit organization, has been the nation’s largest educational library for students with print disabilities. Here in Southern California, RFB&D serves 4,700 students with its library of accessible textbooks. RFB&D-LA has three recording studios, located in Hollywood, El Segundo and Reseda.

RFB&D’s AudioPlus™ digitally recorded textbooks are a long-awaited innovation in reading technology for people with disabilities who cannot read standard print effectively.

"RFB&D’s AudioPlus books level the playing field for students with disabilities because they offer functions that significantly enhance the ability to study and research," says Carol Smith, Executive Director. "Students with disabilities trying to keep pace with their peers in the classroom will now have the same ability to jump immediately across pages and chapters and to bookmark key sections for easy reference later. This is especially helpful to students who are studying for tests, researching subjects, or who have reading assignments that don’t require cover-to-cover reading."

To listen to RFB&D’s AudioPlus textbooks, students need a portable CD player equipped to play RFB&D’s books or a standard multimedia computer equipped with a CD-ROM drive and specialized software. Playback hardware and software will be available through RFB&D for nonprofit sale.

RFB&D’s AudioPlus books are different from other accessible reading materials because they are recorded in human voice by volunteers who are experts in the subject areas they read — not scanned digitally to be played back in synthetic speech, which can often distort or mispronounce scientific, foreign and complex terms.

For more information about RFB&D’s AudioPlus textbooks, call RFB&D-LA at 800 732-TEXT or visit RFB&D-LA’s newly designed accessible website at www.rfbd.org/LA. Information about the new playback equipment and software can be found at www.rfbd.org.

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