Hi Howard,

I am involved with some private correspondence with someone from the League
at this moment.  It has come about due to the accessibility thread I started
yesterday.  I have volunteered to assist the League in this effort.  We
shall see what comes of this.  I am cautiously optimistic.

Publishing copyrighted material to icanworkthisthing.com probably isn't the
best way to go about accessibility.  It is one thing to publish manuals to
radios and other hardware; what good are they without possession of the
actual hardware?  I can imagine that the League and other publishers of
study and other ham related materials would take strong exception to our
openly publishing these in such a way that everyone, regardless of whether
or not they have a disability, could freely download and copy them.  No.
This would certainly serve to hurt our cause and I could not support doing
this without explicit, written permission from the authors or publishers.
Bookshare would be a much better, legal and safer distribution for these
scanned materials.  This is the reason for the existence of Bookshare, why
don't we all use it?

73









----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Kaufman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: Revisiting accessible amateur radio study materials.


> Let's stop bitching and start doing.  If we can find the materials, scan
> them, get a couple of volunteers to clean up the scans, especially the
> formulas, and post them to I Can Work This Thing.com, we are done.
> Might be a project that we could find sighted volunteers from the list or
> from a club to assist with.  It would take an obcessive cumpulsive ham to
> do it, and we know no hams would ever fit that diagnossis, right?
>
> If the new exams are available on-line, why not copy and paste them in to
> a
> document, or just send the URL to the list.
>
> If we want them to make an accessible world for us, we will have to teach
> them how to do it.  They really don't know and it is unrealistic to expect
> them to know.