Renegade Rip

Issue date: 2/7/07 Section: Features

Community colleges are required by federal and California law to stay current with assistive technologies in order for students with disabilities to have the same opportunities as other students. Alternate media is funded by the state of California and is an extension of the Disabled Student Programs & Services department at Bakersfield College.

According to Terri Guerra, the head of the alternate media program, the mission of the alternate media program is to provide books and materials to students with disabilities or impairments who are not able or have difficulty accessing printed material in printed textbooks.

"Alternate media has really helped a lot of students to be able to be successful as a student, and it's important that alternate media be done in as timely a fashion as possible," said Guerra.

"There are times due to our limited resources, mostly due to personnel, that we don't get projects done as quickly as would be best for the students," Guerra said. Guerra is the only full-time staff member for BC's alternate media program.

"I bought my books last semester from the bookstore and got them up to alternative media so they could start working on them," said Kim Flenniken, a blind student at BC who requires books in Braille and on disk format to be read aloud.

Flenniken still hasn't received one of her books because it was not listed as required material for the class. "It's not required because everybody else in the class is sighted. This book is on reserve in the library, but for me it is not on reserve anywhere," said Flenniken.

"We have experienced challenges with the timeliness of the product to the students. So what we do is prioritize based on the formats that are available."

There are students with certain disabilities who could only benefit from one format so those students would be priority number one," said Angelica Gomez, the director of DSP&S. There were 140 alternate media requests made in Spring 2006, a 337% increase since Spring 2004.

"Alternate media during the last two years has really been growing and we have seen the need for support in that area to meet the needs of our students. More students rely on technology to learn and become more independent. We foresee the growth will just continue," said Gomez.

Bakersfield College's alternate media and assistive technologies range from computer software that reads text print aloud, high speed scanners that quickly scan the pages of a textbook, formats it into e-text to Braille embossers, and a machine called "Pictures in a Flash" that raises the lines in a picture or symbol so that the image can be felt by those who can not visually see it.

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