Flor,You might be surprised to find out how difficult it would be for many book publishers to provide electronic files suitable for generating accessible formats - Braille, accessible PDF, DAISY, etc. The problem is in the procedures and technologies that publishers have developed and invested in for producing books. To give a simplified example, suppose an author provides the original text in an MS Word file. This may or may not contain explicit information about the chapter and heading structure of the book, conveyed, for example, using MS Word styles. Even if it does, the publishing company will then convert this to some desktop publishing format like Quark which gives the editor the tools he or she needs to lay out the content visually. But in the process of laying out the structure is removed or destroyed, for example by turning headings into fonts and colours and breaking up paragraphs. Then it gets worse. The editor makes changes to the text. But these are made in the Quark version, not in the original MS Word version. So you now have two versions. One which has lost all the structural information and replaced it with visual clues and the other which is out of date content-wise. Both are useless for producing accessible formats. This is a simplified example. There are many other issues and it gets even worse when you include illustrations, tables, graphs, call-outs, footnotes, cross references, etc.
We at NCBI, in partnership with many organisations in Europe and worldwide, are working on this issue and trying to devise and promote publishing workflows that can produce accessible formats easily and economically. Aside from the many technical issues that have to be tackled, there is the challenge of changing processes in an industry where there are not even any standard processes - all publishers seem to do things differently according to what they have arrived at over the course of time. Perhaps the biggest issues to be faced are those around copyright and the publishers' fear of theft - electronic formats are seen to be more open to illegal copying and distribution. It's a tough area. But we're making progress all the time.
Mark On 10 Apr 2008, at 14:10, Flor Lynch wrote:
It would be simple enough for book publishers to provide, as a matter of routine, accessible PDF or accessible electronic files of books so that they could be brailled,recorded into DAISY, etc.
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