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Don’t think that access issues are important in e-books, or on the Net as a whole? Well, consider the following stats from Access Through Technology–an article by Marti Goddard in School Library Journal:

Census 2000 figures indicate that more than 19 percent of the U.S. population aged five and older are people with disabilities. The estimated 50 million individuals who comprise this group especially need access to computers in libraries. Citing data from the 1999 Survey on Income and Program Participation, a report published by the U.S. Department of Commerce states, “People who have a disability were only half as likely to live in homes with Internet access than those without any disability. And while just under 25 percent of people without a disability have never used a personal computer, the situation is quite different for those who have a disability. Close to 60 percent of people who have at least one type of disability have never used a computer.”

Meanwhile, via the Blind Chance blog, you can hear David Faucheux’s comments on Ms. Goddard–access manager for the San Francisco Public Library–and her article.

The TeleRead take: It’s great to learn of efforts to reach the blind at home and the library, as is the case in San Francisco. A TeleRead-style approach could vastly increase the number of books available to the blind by making everything accessible from the start and considering special hardware requirements. By default TeleRead could use XML-related technologies of the kind that would work well with speech synthesis. The best way to mainstream the blind and other people with disabilities is to build in their needs from the start, especially in the e-book format category. Coincidentally the same technologies would also allow the display of content on a variety of machines–making this mainstreaming tack especially cost-effective.

(Thanks to Alev for discovering the Goddard article.)

 
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