Is AFT Right For You?

What is AFT? 

The acronym “AFT” stands for Alternate Format Text. There are two separate but complementary parts of the AFT accommodation. 

• Approved students have the ability to request that their required textbooks to be provided to them by our office in electronic format. Please see the following page for information regarding how the AFT Request Process works. 
• Approved students can also be provided with a text-speech reader to access documents that our office provides and other resources such as PDF, Word, EPUB documents. Resources read by a text-to-speech reader can be obtained from a professor’s LMS site, Database, the web, and so on. It is important to note that the text-to-speech software that we provide is more advanced then free web extensions and those integrated within some websites. The two most common Text-to-speech programs that we recommend are Kurzweil 3000 and Read&Write.  

Approved students will learn more about the resources available to them during their AFT Intake appointment. 

Who can Benefit from Using AFT? 

Students who are blind, have low vision, benefit from enlarging text or images, experience mobility challenges, can not carry heavy textbooks, or learn better by having material read out loud are just some of those who could benefit from using AFT. 

Next Step for Interested Students 

Qualified students must first be approved to use AFT as an accommodation before they can access the services we provide. Interested students should contact the Office of Disability Services (ODS) for information about the approval process. Already approved students should visit our Getting Started with AFT page.