From The Conversation:
Proposed changes to Australia’s copyright law should make it easier for people to create and distribute versions of copyrighted works that are accessible to people with disabilities.
The Copyright Amendment (Disability Access and other Measures) Bill was introduced to Parliament on Wednesday.
If passed, it would enable people with disabilities to access and enjoy books and other material in formats they can use, such as braille, large print or DAISY audio.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has long been calling for action to end the “world book famine” – only 5% of books produced in Australia are available in accessible formats. This means that people with vision impairment and other reading disabilities are excluded from a massive proportion of the world’s knowledge and culture.
Under the current law, educational institutions and other organisations can produce accessible copies of books, but the system is slow and expensive. Only a small number of popular books are available, and technical books that people need for work are often out of reach.
Technology should make accessibility much easier, but publishers have been slow to enable assistive technologies.
. . . .
Amazon’s Kindle, for example, used to allow text-to-speech to help blind people read books, but Amazon gave in to publishers’ fears and allowed them to disable the feature. Apple’s electronic books are much better, but there are still major gaps.
Link to the rest at The Conversation
A dose of reality: For most of authors traditionally published, we gave/give permission for free for Daisy and Braille for persons with sight and hearing challenges. Amazon doesnt need to be doing that. In fact, I would not want some weirdo mechanistic voice carrying on.
We prefer the actual living, warm blooded readers who
Readers for the Blind brings to the works for instance,[we’ve read for RFTB too, magazines mainly]. The living readers are dedicated, heartfull people. And the work reaches those with sight and hearing challenges without charge.
If Amazon is all about business then publishers can be all about business too. However, Penguini, Random and Harper Collins, those bad bad publishers were actually THE ones to ask us if we would like to lend our works to be read for the blind and in braille for those with hearing challenges. Many many well known and not so well known authors yet, who write good works, are on Daisy and in braille. It’s just that the suppliers take care of distribution. And publicity to people with special needs. We are happy to be partners.
Another reality: audible is owned by amazon and on their program one can hear many books for free, one need not game the system.
All the Amazon Fire tablets have excellent text-to-speech function and the smaller ones are cheaper than the Kindle e-readers. IOS devices also have excellent text-to-speech, and can read all Kindle-format books in the Kindle app and can read ePubs in the Overdrive app.
Publishers can restrict the settings on individual books to block text-to-speech function and they usually do that if there is an Audible version of the book. By chance, I found a free screen reader app on my Fire that allows me to read a restricted book loaded into the Overdrive app via text-to-speech. (It does require being able to select the text, which would be difficult for a fully blind user, but for partially sighted worked just fine.)
so don’t blame Amazon for inaccessible books, blame the publishers.
“Amazon gave in to publishers’ fears and allowed them(publishers) to disable the feature.”
Trad-pub does everything they can to make sure they get every buck they can out of each format — even if they don’t plan to ever make that format (large print/audio) available.
Oh don’t even get me started on the text-to-speech issue, it was shocking to see the authors guild trying to restrict access for visually impaired people A few years ago
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090210/1014293724.shtml
What really annoys me about all of this is that I doubt authors have any say in the matter.