At all levels of post-secondary education, gaining access to academic and scholarly materials in alternative formats remains one of the principal challenges encountered by students with a print disability. Technological progress over the past few decades, particularly the advent of online full-text databases delivered via the World Wide Web, has significantly expanded the range of books, journal articles and other resources available in electronic form that can be converted into braille or read by a computer equipped with synthetic speech.

The existence of a needed work in an electronic format does not, in itself, guarantee accessibility. Rather, the degree of access afforded to the student depends on the quality of the electronic resource, technical details of the file format in which it is represented, and the sophistication of the software, for example a screen reader, by which it is read.

This presentation serves two purposes. First, it offers a review of the practical opportunities and strategies available to students today in gaining access to needed materials in braille and audio formats. Secondly, looking to the future, it identifies discrepancies between the technologies, notably screen readers and braille translators, available to students and their supporters today, and the technologies made possible by relevant research into braille translation and auditory user interfaces. It is emphasized that in order to take advantage of these technical developments, suppliers of electronic resources need to offer documents in the semantically richer formats developed over the past decade for the World Wide Web, which have also been integrated into Daisy standards.