Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers

Braille is an embossed, tactile code of six dots; any combination of these six dots represent letters and numbers. Since many blind people read Braille, the ATAC has been proactive about helping such students.

The staff at the ATAC regularly produces Braille course materials, quizzes, and tests. We also occasionally honor community requests for Braille materials such as bus schedules and restaurant menus, as time permits.

The following pages can help you learn more about Braille:

• Overview of Braille
• Braille Hardware at the ATAC
  Includes printers/embossers, readers, refreshable braille displays, and portable note-taking devices.

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Designed to assist people with vision impairments, tactile graphics allow the user to feel maps, diagrams, etc. by touch. Images are printed on special paper and run through a thermal enhancer. This causes the paper to raise in the areas where the ink is located, thus creating a raised form of the image on the paper. A client can then run their fingers over the graphic(s) to feel the spatial representation of the image.

Graphics to be created through this service can be sent to the Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers during working hours or via email attachment (address the email to iuadapts, followed by @indiana.edu Choose the appropriate method for sending them based on the number and size of the graphics. Graphics must also be sent in a minimum of 10 working days before they are needed.

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Designed as a supplementary service to compliment the use of Kurzweil 3000.

Audio Books as MP3s is self-service program through the Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers that allows clients the ability to take sections or whole books processed for use with Kurzweil 3000 and convert those files into an audio mp3 format. Creation of the files is also accomplished using Kurzweil 3000.

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The Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers sponsor subscriptions to the Bookshare Program for our eligible clients, giving them access to a large library of downloadable books for pleasure reading at no cost to the client.

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The ATAC's captioning service enables captions to be added to videos, especially videos that will be used on Web sites. Using the most current version of the captioning tool, MAGpie, produced by the National Center for Accessible Media to the ATAC can create captions for videos and multimedia presentations.

The captions represent the audio content of video presentations (spoken words and audio descriptions of other audible sounds in the video.) The captioned information is displayed at the bottom of the video and is appropriately synchronized with the video. Captioned video can be in QuickTime, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player format.

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