Greetings,
Received this from TNAUK this morning.
From: tnauk <tnauk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 11:59:23 +0100 (BST)
Blind access to texts
The article below, which appeared in Nature on 11th July na130711,
may be of general interest to subscribers.
#16 Deal boosts blind's access to texts
Global copyright agreement will increase availability of
scientific texts in accessible formats.
Declan Butler
An international treaty approved on 27 June is a major victory for
people with visual impairments. The 186 member states of the World
Intellectual Property Organization came to a historic agreement to
remove copyright obstacles that have hampered the global availability
of textbooks and other published works in accessible formats such as
braille, large print and audio.
The agreement, which has been a decade in the making, was reached in
Marrakesh, Morocco, after more than a week of intense negotiations. All
ratifying states must now introduce national copyright exemptions that
will allow government agencies and non-profit bodies to convert
published works to accessible versions and distribute them globally to
visually impaired people.
The agreement also means that organizations for the blind will be able
to freely share their collections of accessibly formatted works across
borders, in particular with developing nations. Only around one-third
of the world's countries, mostly the richest, have such copyright
exceptions in place. Yet 90% of the world's 285 million visually
impaired people live in developing countries, according to the World
Health Organization. The treaty will help visually impaired individuals
worldwide to have "access to and full participation in science
education and research", says Richard Weibl, director of the Project on
Science, Technology, and Disability at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in Washington DC.
But organizations for blind people have the resources to convert only a
fraction of the books and other materials published each year. So they
are also pushing for publishers to format their mainstream products to
be fully accessible to the blind from the outset and for suppliers of
devices such as e-readers, tablets and smartphones to ensure that such
content is usable.
"We have not yet seen the adoption of accessible formats and standards
on the scale that we would like to see, particularly in the area of
scientific and mathematical texts," says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman
for the US National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland.
A big step towards that goal came in March, when the International
Publishers Association endorsed EPUB 3 -- sweeping international
standards for publishing multimedia-rich, interactive digital content
on all devices.
EPUB 3 incorporates the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY)
Consortium standards that many organizations for blind people use to
convert books and other published content to accessible formats. The
DAISY standards are a set of specifications for formatting digital
documents that allow for unrivalled speech-based access to texts. They
permit blind people to easily navigate chunky textbooks, for example,
to add audio notes, and to create and find bookmarks. The DAISY
standards also make figures, graphics and equations machine-readable
and thus accessible to the blind through a range of software and
devices, including refreshable braille, embossing printers and tactile
tablets.
"I'm very excited about EPUB 3," says Mark Doyle, director of journal
information systems at the American Physical Society (APS) in New York.
The APS is one of the few publishers to have experimented with using
DAISY standards so far. Adding DAISY functionality to the society's
papers would have been too cumbersome and costly, he says. But in the
coming years it will be much easier to include it now that the APS is
shifting its publishing workflow towards using EPUB 3 across the board.
However, whether publishers will take full advantage of the
opportunities offered by EPUB 3 to make graphics and equations
accessible remains a concern, says John Gardner, a solid-state
physicist and founder of ViewPlus Technologies in Corvallis, Oregon.
Gardner lost his sight at the age of 48 and has since dedicated his
talents to developing assistive software and devices to make scientific
content more accessible to the blind.
Even if publishers do widely embrace EPUB 3's accessibility features,
another big unknown is whether e-readers and other devices will support
them. Amazon's Kindle reader, for example, provides access to a vast
library, including classics such as Molecular Biology of the Cell (5th
edn, Garland Science, 2012), but is "still not fully accessible", says
Danielsen.
Broader access came in May, when Amazon released an application that
allows many Kindle e-books to be read on Apple devices using Apple's
VoiceOver -- a screen reader designed for the blind. Organizations for
the blind give Apple products top marks for their attention to
accessibility. Larry Hjelmeland, a blind researcher at the University
of California, Davis, who studies the biology of eye ageing, says that
Apple's latest operating system has made it much easier for him to read
everything from e-mails to scientific papers.
Gardner hopes that the treaty and advances in technology will also help
to address the under-representation of the visually impaired in
science. "These people tend to have restricted opportunities for social
interaction and entertainment," he says. "So they often are much more
productive than people without disabilities."
____________________________________________________________
Macmillan Publishers ltd.
** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:-
** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe]
** If this link doesn't work then send a message to:
** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
** and in the Subject line type
** unsubscribe
** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the
** immediately-following link:-
** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq]
** or send a message, to
** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq
