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Technological Protection Measures and the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This has created the ironic situation where blind people, who because of their disability require access to digital copies, have been effectively locked out of purchasing ebooks for the last decade. Authorized entities need access to digital content in order to cost-effectively deliver access.

Measure 181
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Bringing Millions of Books to Billions of People: Making the Book Truly Accessible

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The miracle of ebooks What if we had the ability to overcome these accessibility barriers, barriers that affect most of humanity, not just people with identified disabilities, wouldn’t we have the moral obligation to act? We can use the same ebook file to deliver the content ten different ways. We can do better!

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Social DRM: It’s About Equal Access for All

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Next month, I will be heading to TOC a couple of days early in order to participate in a W3C Workshop on eBooks and the Open Web Platform, where I will be talking about Social DRM (Digital Rights Management). However, strong DRM turns out to be an impediment to the commercial distribution of accessible ebooks.

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On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

argued that we must shift from spending on the provision of hard copy braille to the provision of refreshable braille and the associated digital file formats to enable people to read so much more. “As Another major challenge involves the graphic content in ebooks, such as pictures, charts, and diagrams, formulas and special symbols.

Literacy 208
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Upholding The Social Bargain: Bookshare and Copyright Compliance

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The deal was: help people with disabilities that can't access books and don't hurt the economic interests of the publishers (and authors). uses the term "Competent Authority" to describe these professionals). We run regular searches on the Web for Bookshare content -- much like publishers and authors do.

Copyright 158
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The Struggle for Book Access (Blog Post #1)

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

I’ve been watching with interest the legal controversy over the synthetic speech capability of the new version of the Amazon Kindle, such as the coverage on Boing-Boing entitled Author's Guild claims text-to-speech software is illegal. It’s easy to dismiss the authors’ concerns (as many have in the tech community) as greedy or Luddite.

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Objecting to Accessibility Weaseling

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Last week, the National Federation of the Blind and 22 organizations serving people with disabilities filed detailed objections to a petition from a group of makers of e-reader devices led by Amazon to be exempted from accessibility requirements under the relatively new Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.