There is a solid draw for people with vision impairment to get into the software arts; namely, it is just about the highest paying set of jobs that we can actually get. So, one might think that books about programming languages, techniques, algorithmics, etc. would find a reasonable market in our community.
Unfortunately, most books on these technologies include a ton of diagrams, screen shots and other graphical material which is essential to the text. As far as I know, I don't think there has been a set of guidelines for translating such diagrams to text and there are no tools available to provide screen reading like functionality in a diagram.
Converting a mainstream technology book to one that we can use with any degree of efficiency is an enormous bitch. Three of us tried to scan, OCR and then correct a book about using Drupal 6. The project we had estimated at a few days of spare time ended up taking a couple of months to get it in a state acceptable for Bookshare.
Others on this list have text copies of various books floating around and bookshare.org has a rather large collection. I wouldn't recommend trying to invest in a business that makes programming books for blinks as I doubt it will fly.
cdh On Sep 29, 2009, at 9:45 AM, Paul Martz wrote:
Hi folks -- I know we're all blind or visually impaired here, and we'd like any programming manuals to be in an accessible format. But does anyone have any hard data on the size of the market for blind- accessible programming books?It seems that if the market size were significant, publishers would take steps to make more programming books accessible.Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC _http://www.skew-matrix.com_ <http://www.skew-matrix.com/> +1 303 859 9466 __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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