Accessibility + security for copiers.

Hello all,

Excuse the post spam by me its not often I find a forum with content I am interested in (I have yet to poke round the all the sections!)

Now to question 1 - Despite the best efforts by manufactures some users have issues using all machines. I was wondering how you deal with any accessibility issues while photocopying/scanning from a copier/mfd? How do you ensure all your students / staff that have a disability can access and use the machine. For example how easy can a sight impaired user scan a document to email from the mfd sitting in one of your copier rooms? Or do you simply not do anything for accessibility yet?

Its something that interests me and I think will become more and more important as time goes on.

My second question is simply – what solution / measures do you have in place to stop users stealing paper. I am sure you are aware that paper magically wonders off to users home printers and I have seen various counter measures put in place to stop this (it mostly depends on the machine) so what do you do?

Im off to have a poke round the off topic section of the forum.

Pupils do not have access to photocopying facilities in our school - it is all done by staff. We have no users with disabilites that would affect the use of photocopiers on our staff team so we'd just jump that hurdle when we get there.

We also don't have much problem with paper theft either, however at my old uni, printers were caged so that paper trays could not be opened without a key.

Our newer copiers (read Toshiba) have tilting screens so they can be lowered / tilted down to the correct height for wheelchair users. The screens colours can also be inveted from pale blue background with dark blue text to dark blue background with pale bluey white text. I believe that meets all the DDA stuff at the time the machine was designed and certified.

As for stealing paper, solution is a steel bar with 2 clamps either end, one clamp on the floor / worktop and the other on the top door of the copier / drawer, and this bar has a padlock on it to stop it being removed, this stops them from opening the drawers.

NO ONE gets past the HMs secretary carrying paper... Oh, and the kids are banned from using the copiers.

Our photocopying is done in two ways, while staff have access they can also submit a copy request form fill in the details then this copying will be handled by administration staff this way it stops big ques at the copiers so if we were to have those with visual imparments or disabilities i guess they would need to use the copy request form.