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DRM, the Kindle and the Blind – from a session at the O’Reilly conference
February 11, 2008 | 4:22 pm
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By Paul Biba
David and I are here at the conference and I must admit I’m finding it very interesting. Most of this is completely new to me, so as a “newbie” some of the basic stuff that may be old hat to David is not to me.
One of the things that absolutely shocked me comes from the session on “Making Digital Publishing Accessible to Who are Blind and Print Disabled.” According to the participants DRM generally prevents the blind from reading ebooks. It blocks screen readers and other technologies. I was astonished. By the way, we were told that it would probably impossible to make the Kindle accessible to the handicapped in its current form.
Well, just a short post. David and I are in a seminar while I’m typing this, so more later.
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Comments:
DRM adds in two pain points for using Screen Readers, such as Jaws. The first is that DRM usually locks you into a specific application which may or may not play well with the screen readers, since good support for the Screen Readers takes a bit of work to get right (it took Acrobat 2 versions – 3 years, for instance). The second is that since APIs for Screen Readers are generally available and to be useful the application needs to provide the full text of what you are reading, those APIs make for interesting attack points for people looking to remove the DRM from text. So the more paranoid publishers prefer the permission in the DRM to disallow access to the screen reading APIs (application permitting of course).
Hardware devices (such as the Kindle) would need to have the accessibility built in, or would need be programmable enough to have it provided later (XO, N800, etc). Given that the Kindle is a closed platform, I wouldn’t expect to see this happening any time soon.
For more on this topic, check out:
The Soundproof Book: Exploration of Rights conflict and Access to Commercial EBooks for People with Disabilities
http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/informationaldocs/soundproof/soundproof.htm
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The Next Textbook? Finding—or Creating—Alternative Instructional Materials for College Students
http://www.accessiblecontent.com/online/v1n3/index.php?view=textbook