AccessText Network

The AccessText Network facilitates the delivery of textbooks in electronic format to higher education institutions for use by students with disabilities. AccessText incorporates information on over 300,000 titles from leading textbook publishers. For more information on membership visit www.accesstext.org.

Publishers

If you are a publisher who would like information about participating in the Publisher Look-Up Service or the AccessText Network, please contact us.

Students/Faculty

If you are seeking an electronic format of a book or permission to scan it, please contact your campus DSS office. The DSS office is responsible for certifying student eligibility for accommodations and is typically the publisher's main point of contact.

In order to simplify the process for requesting and obtaining files for alternate formats, the following publishers have agreed to the guidelines below: Cengage Learning, Reed Elsevier, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill Education, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, and John Wiley & Sons.

1. At the request of a student needing an alternate file, the school’s disabilities coordinator (DSC) or comparable employee responsible for providing services for students with disabilities fills out the Request Form, which provides the publisher with all of the information needed to fulfill the request. The disabilities coordinator must attest to the fact that the student is registered at the school, has a verified disability, and has purchased a copy of the book.
2. The publisher will provide the files free of charge, but the student must purchase a copy of the instructional materials.
3. In order to speed up processing, the DSC should provide ISBN(s) for the exact product(s) being ordered. (If the student needs several components in a package, please provide each ISBN, if possible. If not, describe the components of the package.)
4. Once submitted, the publisher reviews the information submitted and either approves or declines the requests.
5. Once approved, if the electronic file is available it will be sent to the requestor, usually within 15 business days.
6. If the files are not available, the requestor is notified, and a solution is worked out with the DSC. The institution may be granted a one-time permission to scan the book for the student.
7. Files may be provided as Word, ASCII, PDF, or other agreed-upon format.
8. If the student needs the material in an end-user format rather than the file provided by the publisher, the student or the school is responsible for converting the files into other formats.
9. If the DSC has more than one student needing the same file, permission must be submitted for each student (i.e., a new form must be filled out for each student). A publisher may allow a school to reuse a file for additional students, but this is a decision to be made by an individual publisher in a written agreement with the school.