Books

You probably saw this coming around, didn’t you? Accessible web sites, movies, videos, and now, pornography!

We here at Even Grounds strongly believe in making entertainment accessible, and yes, this includes forms of entertainment that may be a bit “excitingly erotic”, if we may say so.

An international accord that would vastly expand the range of books and other copyright materials accessible to millions of blind people around the world came a step closer this week after a
surprise shift in approach by Washington.

Organisations representing blind and visually impaired people have been pressing for years for a global pact that would allow books produced in Braille and other special formats, including digitised audio texts, to be shared across national borders.

Flat World Knowledge, the leading publisher of expert-authored, open content college textbooks, today became the first dedicated college textbook publisher to supply its digital textbooks to Bookshare, the world’s largest online accessible library for people with print disabilities.

Approximately one to two percent of the U.S. population has print disabilities that qualify for Bookshare. This agreement will benefit more than 75,000 Bookshare members who are blind or who have low vision, a physical disability or a severe learning disability that affects reading. In addition, the open content license will allow other users to benefit from accessible content: students who are English language learners, those who have mild or undiagnosed
disabilities and those who benefit from multi-modal reading with a combination of simultaneous highlighted text and computer-generated speech.

Last month, Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin expressed concern
that Amazon's Kindles weren't accessible for blind students. Amazon responded this week.

Amazon announced plans to create a blind-accessible Kindle, the Daily Orange reports. The new gadget will have an audible menu and an extra large font for visually impaired users. The product should be ready by summer, Amazon says.

Google’s Book Search program will help the blind and wheelchair-bound read more, a disability group told a federal judge Wednesday, giving Google some much needed support in its attempt to create the online library and bookstore of the future.

A proposed treaty that would change copyright laws to allow the supply of books across borders for the benefit of blind people has survived resistance from the US, UK, France, Germany and other countries.

A committee of the World Intellectual Property Organisation agreed on Friday "to continue without delay" its work on "facilitating the access of blind, visually-impaired and other reading-disabled persons to copyright-protected works."

In February, 2009 Amazon released Kindle 2, its new electronic book reader. The device was able to use text-to-speech to read books aloud. Due to pressure from the Author's Guild, Amazon allows authors to disable this functionality, thus taking away information from millions of people who live with a disability.