Skip to main content

Alternative Formats

If you have been approved to receive alternative formats, you can follow these steps to search for and request books.

Searching for accessible texts:

  1. The first place to search when purchasing your books is Bookshare. Bookshare's catalog is free to anyone with a print disability. Best of all, you wouldn't have to purchase the book. If Bookshare has your book, you can select that book in the Commodore Access Portal, and we will get you access to it under our institutional Bookshare account.
  2. Next, you can look on both VitalSource and RedShelf for your books. These are both paid services, but they advertise their books as being fully accessible.
  3. The Accessible Textbook Finder is able to search all of these services at once!

Requesting accessible texts from Student Access:

Providing Proof-of-Ownership

If you cannot find your books in any of these services, you can request that our office gets you a copy. In that case, you will need to provide proof of ownership. We accept a photo of your receipt or a photo of the book you're requesting with your student ID in the same shot.

  1. Log into the Commodore Access Portal and click on Alternative Formats on the left side:
    alt format link on commodore access portal
  2. Next, use the Choose File button to search your device for the receipt or image of your book+ID and then mark which course(s) it applies to:
    screenshot of upload book receipt with choose file button and checkboxes for each course

Selecting books that you need Student Access to find or create

  1. Log into the Commodore Access Portal and click on Alternative Formats on the left side:
    alt format link on commodore access portal
  2. Choose Select for each book that you have not found on your ownrequest alternative formats for spring 2020 box in commodore access portal with a select link for each book
  3. Look for emails about the progress of obtaining or creating your accessible copy. If we cannot get the text through the publisher, we will ask you to bring in a physical copy of the text that we can scan.
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/student-access/how_to/get_accommodations/alt-format.php
www.vanderbilt.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-40
19206
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:L55H2RKF5E44ZWATH5ZK33PY4BIHIPQC
<urn:uuid:679d79f4-1df7-4ce3-9fd5-49d3f64182d1>
2020-09-23T04:31:53Z
99.83.227.89
text/html
sha1:F7NK7HGWOUQFHIRJMNYLA6755VMKKAEL
<urn:uuid:bbc67f80-fdcd-4cd9-b80e-1ac4289d841a>
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/student-access/how_to/get_accommodations/alt-format.php
response
<urn:uuid:0853e805-37e8-416e-afd4-f055805ca539>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-11.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/