Category: Cram Session
Hi, it's an age-old problem isn't it? You have great tutors who email stuff to you before lectures but when you open the documents you can't read them because of the way they're formatted! Well I'm now considering a small busines idea to combat all that!
Basically, having had this problem myself and also reformatting documents for friends, I've grown quite experienced at knowing the various ways you can chop out the inaccessible and unnecessary rubbish in these documents and make them screen reader friendly.
I'm now considering starting a small business from home - people (disability support workers, students themselves etc) send me their inaccessible documents (preferably electronically) and as quickly as possible i reformat them to make them accessible and send them back. I could accept printed or electronic submissions but to start with would only return documents electronically due to the expense of postage and printing!
This is my way of doing some market research!
1. Would this service be useful? Would there be enough demand?
2. How could I price it effectively?
Anyone with any useful ideas around this?
Thanks all!
Well, what documents specifically are you referring to, PDF, PowerPoint lectures or notes from note takers?
I find, for instance, pdf documents, especially containing any sort of tables or graphs impossible to work with and I probably would have paid to have them converted to, for instance, Excel, so that I could explore those more freely. Same with PowerPoint, just extracting the notes from the slides and putting them into a readable Word or Notepad document would've been worth something.
You'd have to have a more solid business plan. I think, for instance, you could work with the Rsource offices of certain colleges to begin with to get client, they might get you more material and might have money to pay for the convertions.
Hi, thanks for your ideas. I'm thinking I'd convert virtually any document - Powerpoint lecture presentations, inaccessible PDFs and even inaccessible word documents when they are produced with graphs and diagrams in them. No end of documents I've done before for friends have contained diagrams and pictures that are totally unnecessary - they got removed straight away! I'm just trying to work out the best way to price it all, whether to do it according to the length of time it takes or the length or the complexity. Any ideas would be grateful?
why not just do all unformatted documents?
I think it would be a good idea for those who would need it, fortunately my University's Disability Services department does this for me for no charge, but I can definitely understand where this would come in handy for those without that luxury, or for those taking online courses, etc..
My recommendation for pricing would be something like this:
- A set cost for the conversion of certain formats (i.e. if one format is significantly more time consuming/complicated to convert then another, it would cost more)
- Set costs for the actual amount of conversions (i.e. a bracket for 1 - 10 pages, higher bracket for 11 - 20 pages, etc. )
The other thing is, if somehow it would be possible to add in text descriptions of pictures, diagrams, and the like. I know I really appreciate this, but of course it requires someone sighted to assist, unless you have some vision. Of course, if you found a way to do this, you could add on a small charge for text descriptions of diagrams and whatever else.
Hope this helps any