Re: What's the market for accessible books on programming?
- From: "The Elf" <inthaneelf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:36:58 -0700
Chris,
your quite correct on the full time business aspect, with the enormity of
different books, and the other factors it would fall flat due to lack of
"instantly available" work to sell for supporting the endeavor.
now a volunteer group or a NFP (not for profit) setup with little
expectations and no restrictions on time except for getting it out before
the end of the last semester that the book is being used, might be able to
make a go at it, but would take, as you pointed out, a lot of hours to get a
single book done, then you would have to find the places that use that book,
and would have to start almost all over again every year or so due to "new
updated versions" coming out.
take care,
inthane
proprietor, The Grab Bag,
for blind computer users and programmers
http://grabbag.alacorncomputer.com
Owner: Alacorn Computer Enterprises
"own the might and majesty of a Alacorn!"
www.alacorncomputer.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Hofstader" <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 7:15 AM
Subject: Re: What's the market for accessible books on programming?
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
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