Jason Mandarino used to start looking for textbooks as many as five months before his next set of courses was scheduled to begin.
It can be tedious trying to find electronic versions of college texts, especially those just recently published. Mandarino, a business management student at Augusta State University, needs those texts so his computer, which uses speech-output software, can read the words to him. He has been blind since age 13, when a benign tumor on the right side of his brain caused permanent damage to his optic nerve.
Thanks to the Georgia Tech-based Alternative Media Access Center, Mandarino, 23, now can get his electronic textbooks as PDF files in as little as 24 hours.
"If I didn't start looking until December and the class started in January, I wouldn't get the book until February," he said after a business class last week at Allgood Hall. "By then, you're too far behind."
AMAC, an initiative of the University System of Georgia's Board of Regents, recently began a partnership with the nationwide nonprofit venture AccessText Network. It keeps an archive of alternative college textbooks. Once one student requests a text, the access center can make it available quickly to the next person with the same request.
"The AccessText Network would feed information from these colleges and universities to an (application)," said Dr. Christopher Lee, the director of AMAC, in a telephone interview. "The app would direct them to these publishers through data feeds, similar to how publishers feed Amazon on their books. The publisher either fulfills or denies the request based on if they own the copyright to the textbook. If they do have it, they put it up on an FTP server, and it would be downloaded to the college or institution."
The new partnership gives students at 50 Georgia colleges and universities, including ASU, Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia, access to more than 360,000 alternative textbook titles on AccessText Network's nationwide database. Several South Carolina colleges also participate, including the University of South Carolina Aiken, USC's main campus in Columbia and Clemson University.
Lee said that through the partnership, AMAC is fulfilling students' orders for textbooks within about four days.
He added that the national database covers about 92 percent of the college textbook market, so chances are good that students will have access to the textbooks they are seeking.
Mandarino said that without AMAC to speed his access to textbooks, he likely would not be on track to graduate from ASU in 2011. The complications involved with hunting down textbooks sometimes forced him to delay taking certain courses.
"They're very accessible," he said of AMAC. "I ordered a book one time when the class had already started. I asked, 'Can I get Chapter 1?' (An AMAC staffer named) Zach has shot me the first three chapters and then the rest of the book as it's become available."
Jason Mandarino had his sight until he was 13. He was in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he had lived since he was 4.
"I had a brain tumor. They never really did figure out what caused it; they said it was a fluke," he said. "Thankfully, it wasn't cancerous, so they were able to remove it."
But even a benign tumor can cause significant damage. In Mandarino's case, the tumor had grown so large on the right side of his brain, a complicated, delicate surgery was required to remove it.
A combination of the tumor and the effects of the surgery damaged his optic nerve, and he at first was diagnosed as being temporarily blind.
"They told me six months at first," he said. "But because of the surgery and the existing swelling to my brain, it finalized the damage to the optic nerve."
He got the news in January 2001, five months after his ordeal started, while he was in eighth grade, that he would never get his sight back.
"After six months of being blind, when they said my sight was not coming back, it wasn't a sucker punch," Mandarino said. "I still go through phases of being bitter, but it's not necessarily about the blindness. I just feel sometimes like I have to do twice as much as anyone else."
After his diagnosis, he was given access to special equipment, including JAWS for Windows, a speech-output program that reads words printed on a computer screen. He moved to the Augusta area in January 2004 and graduated from Greenbrier High School the next year, then enrolled in Augusta State University in fall 2005.
Over the years, Mandarino has become so proficient with JAWS, which stands for "Job Access With Speech," he can listen to a PDF textbook file at four to five times the speed at which a typical person would read it out loud.
He gets around campus with the help of his cane. With math texts, especially when the math problems involve graphic elements, he will seek the help of a sighted person to describe the diagram. Otherwise, he generally can study about as efficiently as any sighted person.
Mandarino said he is considering going to graduate school after finishing his undergraduate degree, which he plans to earn by the end of 2011, and then start his career. He eventually would like to become a small-business consultant.
What has gotten Mandarino through the tough times, especially since he moved to the Augusta area, is his faith.
"It's helped me realize that blindness is not an end to life," he said. "It's an opportunity God has given me to experience life in a different way."
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