(Post n.1 here).
Paradoxically, perhaps, the question of an adequate protection of the rights to read of people with print disabilities became particularly pressing with the advent of the digital society.
Paradoxically, perhaps, the question of an adequate protection of the rights to read of people with print disabilities became particularly pressing with the advent of the digital society.
For the general reading population, the pervasive deployment of information and communication technologies makes available many innovative and exciting ways in which copyright material can be enjoyed. The same technology has also pushed doors of opportunity open to provide new solutions to meet the needs of print disabled people. For instance, a visually impaired person can now take a traditional printed text and convert it to an accessible format by using main stream and increasingly affordable technology like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, scanning devices, screen readers or an electronic (refreshable) Braille display. Moreover, e-books hold the promise of providing greatly increased accessibility for print disabled persons compared to the analogue media. As it already happened in the past, new general purpose technology, i.e. innovations not conceived having the needs of specific categories of users in mind, can greatly benefit also the print disabled. Thus, Thomas Edison correctly anticipated in 1878 that the then newly conceived phonograph player would have led, eventually, to the availability of “[p]honographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.”
Even with our propitious technological advances, however, print disabled people still encounter significant difficulties in accessing written resources. Electronic texts, for instance, are often inaccessible because of the non-availability of specific text-to-speech or text-to-braille capabilities, or because of the need to buy dedicated, and often relatively expensive, equipment. Moreover, deliberate hardware limitations such as those found in popular e-readers hamper accessibility. Most importantly, whilst written materials today are commonly created as digital works, the formats employed by the publishing industry are seldom genuinely accessible, delaying or even blocking “off the shelf access” for the print disabled.
[This blog's "Feuilleton de l'été 2013" continues - possibly next week]
