Sarah's story

Sarah is a Curriculum officer, for a local authority in the West Midlands. She prepares accessible documents for children with sight loss in primary and secondary schools across Birmingham. There are around 700 blind or partially sighted children across Birmingham who Sarah will potentially provide resources for. Sarah's job requires her to modify a range of resources electronically and enlarge other resources through photocopying or printing.

Hard copy textbooks are often problematic for Sarah. If she is unable to get an electronic file from the publisher she often has to increase the text size by photocopying the textbook onto A3 paper. This is not always suitable for the learner and parts of the textbook will still be inaccessible, but it is sometimes the only option available. This approach also requires Sarah to spend hours at a photocopier enlarging textbooks.

Sarah sees the availability of editable textbooks through Load2Learn as an important resource for her job. In the future Sarah will be able to find the required textbook on Load2Learn and enlarge it to the required size with a few simple keystrokes (whilst maintaining the correct formatting). Sarah thinks this could potentially save her a great deal of time, and allow her to provide resources to students more quickly than she is able to now. She will also be able to modify the textbook to an appropriate size for each learner's needs, no longer relying on a photocopier's limited options for enlarging documents.

Sarah talking about the main benefits of Load2Learn:

"Speed (will be the main benefit), If I can go to the site, download it instantly and print it, if I can turn round a book in a couple of days, that would be the main benefit. At the moment, if a secondary science book comes in I will photocopy it, stand at a photocopier for an hour and photo-enlarge it onto A3 paper. That is the best I can do at present without spending weeks and weeks scanning and modifying it. If we have a student that this is not sufficient for then Load2Learn would fill that gap immediately."

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