TESTLAB – Library Services for Visually Impaired Students in Austria

Access to library catalogues and electronic documents as well as the provision of study literature in alternative formats for visually impaired students requires special services to be offered from university libraries. Libraries offering services for visually impaired students have to install and maintain workstations equipped with adaptive technology and to provide training and support for both librarians and users. Furthermore, co-ordination and cooperation with other institutions providing similar services is needed for improvement of quality and efficient use of resources. In the TESTLAB project the Austrian team initiated several activities to reach a common level of quality among Austrian university libraries. A network which allows better coordination and co-operation has been established. Visually impaired students benefit from direct access to library catalogues and more efficient provision of study literature. Introduction In 1996 the EU-funded project TESTLAB (Testing Systems using Telematics for Library Access for Blind and visually handicapped readers) started. The goal of the project is to install adapted workstations in libraries for use by visually impaired readers and then evaluate their effectiveness. In five countries and eighteen libraries adapted workstations have been installed to allow blind and visually handicapped readers to access catalogues, networks, databases and electronic documents. In all cases the developments are based on user needs. An analysis will be made of the user responses (users include the librarians). TESTLAB will provide extended real experience in public and academic libraries of ways in which the target group can be given access to what the sighted take for granted. Not only will the project provide direct benefit to the users of the test sites but will be a model to all other library systems as to how visually handicapped readers can be served. The Educational Endeavour “Computer Science for Blind Students” from the University of Linz is the co-ordinator for the Austrian workpackage. The overall goal of this workpackage is to establish and improve basic services for visually impaired users at several university libraries. This paper gives an overview of the identified issues and how these have been tackled by activities initiated within the TESTLAB project. 2 Austrian University Libraries Currently eight university libraries in Austria provide special services for visually impaired students. All of them at least provide adapted workstations equipped with adaptive access technology like braille display, speech output, screen magnification, scanner and optical character recognition (OCR). Four university libraries also provide transcription services for their students. The workstations which are installed at the Austrian university libraries meet the following hardware specification: • IBM-compatible personal computer (486 or higher) with a minimum of 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended) • LAN/Internet connection • high-resolution, large-scale monitor (21 inches ) • braille display • flatbed scanner • braille printer Devices for synthetic speech output are currently available at nearly all workstations at the Austrian test sites. In addition to the hardware equipment different standard software (e.g. word processor, OCR software, e-mail client, web browser, telnet client) and specific accessibility software (e.g. screen reader, screen magnification) is provided. The basic operating system is MS-DOS v6.22 and either Win3.11 or Windows95 is used as graphical user interface. Special library services for visually impaired students can only be provided if someone is responsible for running and maintaining the workstations and for teaching the students how to use these services. It is up to the library to decide in which way they want to manage this task. Several models are currently realised: 1. The library provides a librarian who is the primary contact point for visually impaired students asking for literature. These librarians are usually also responsible for running the workstation. They also transcribe books and other literature into digital format. This model works now for three libraries. Other libraries try to follow this model. 2. At the university of Linz the special library services are provided by a special support centre, “Computer Science for Blind Students”. The goal of the support centre is to offer visually impaired students the same studying conditions as the sighted have. The library services and transcription of literature is a basic task of the support centre. 3. In Innsbruck library services are organised by visually impaired students themselves. The library provides only the equipment. The organisation and maintenance of the workstations is done by