Considering the recent interchange on accessibility of printed material, I
have just picked up this which will be of interest to all who contributed.
Blind access to texts
The article below, which appeared in Nature on 11th July na130711, may be of
general interest to subscribers.
#16 Deal boosts blind's access to texts
Global copyright agreement will increase availability of
scientific texts in accessible formats.
Declan Butler
An international treaty approved on 27 June is a major victory for people
with visual impairments. The 186 member states of the World Intellectual
Property Organization came to a historic agreement to remove copyright
obstacles that have hampered the global availability of textbooks and other
published works in accessible formats such as braille, large print and
audio.
The agreement, which has been a decade in the making, was reached in
Marrakesh, Morocco, after more than a week of intense negotiations. All
ratifying states must now introduce national copyright exemptions that will
allow government agencies and non-profit bodies to convert published works
to accessible versions and distribute them globally to visually impaired
people.
The agreement also means that organizations for the blind will be able to
freely share their collections of accessibly formatted works across borders,
in particular with developing nations. Only around one-third of the world's
countries, mostly the richest, have such copyright exceptions in place. Yet
90% of the world's 285 million visually impaired people live in developing
countries, according to the World Health Organization. The treaty will help
visually impaired individuals worldwide to have "access to and full
participation in science education and research", says Richard Weibl,
director of the Project on Science, Technology, and Disability at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC.
But organizations for blind people have the resources to convert only a
fraction of the books and other materials published each year. So they are
also pushing for publishers to format their mainstream products to be fully
accessible to the blind from the outset and for suppliers of devices such as
e-readers, tablets and smartphones to ensure that such content is usable.
"We have not yet seen the adoption of accessible formats and standards on
the scale that we would like to see, particularly in the area of scientific
and mathematical texts," says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the US
National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland.
A big step towards that goal came in March, when the International
Publishers Association endorsed EPUB 3 -- sweeping international standards
for publishing multimedia-rich, interactive digital content on all devices.
EPUB 3 incorporates the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY)
Consortium standards that many organizations for blind people use to convert
books and other published content to accessible formats. The DAISY standards
are a set of specifications for formatting digital documents that allow for
unrivalled speech-based access to texts. They permit blind people to easily
navigate chunky textbooks, for example, to add audio notes, and to create
and find bookmarks. The DAISY standards also make figures, graphics and
equations machine-readable and thus accessible to the blind through a range
of software and devices, including refreshable braille, embossing printers
and tactile tablets.
"I'm very excited about EPUB 3," says Mark Doyle, director of journal
information systems at the American Physical Society (APS) in New York.
The APS is one of the few publishers to have experimented with using DAISY
standards so far. Adding DAISY functionality to the society's papers would
have been too cumbersome and costly, he says. But in the coming years it
will be much easier to include it now that the APS is shifting its
publishing workflow towards using EPUB 3 across the board.
However, whether publishers will take full advantage of the opportunities
offered by EPUB 3 to make graphics and equations accessible remains a
concern, says John Gardner, a solid-state physicist and founder of ViewPlus
Technologies in Corvallis, Oregon.
Gardner lost his sight at the age of 48 and has since dedicated his talents
to developing assistive software and devices to make scientific content more
accessible to the blind.
Even if publishers do widely embrace EPUB 3's accessibility features,
another big unknown is whether e-readers and other devices will support
them. Amazon's Kindle reader, for example, provides access to a vast
library, including classics such as Molecular Biology of the Cell (5th edn,
Garland Science, 2012), but is "still not fully accessible", says Danielsen.
Broader access came in May, when Amazon released an application that allows
many Kindle e-books to be read on Apple devices using Apple's VoiceOver -- a
screen reader designed for the blind. Organizations for the blind give Apple
products top marks for their attention to accessibility. Larry Hjelmeland, a
blind researcher at the University of California, Davis, who studies the
biology of eye ageing, says that Apple's latest operating system has made it
much easier for him to read everything from e-mails to scientific papers.
Gardner hopes that the treaty and advances in technology will also help to
address the under-representation of the visually impaired in science. "These
people tend to have restricted opportunities for social interaction and
entertainment," he says. "So they often are much more productive than people
without disabilities."
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Macmillan Publishers ltd.
ATB
David W Wood
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