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“He shops online for music and books, both e-books and printed versions. He has a state-of-the-art scanning system that will convert the latest book to digital text that his computer can read aloud.” – San Diego Union article headlined Computer advances help people with disabilities work, learn and play in the digital era.

The TeleRead take: Imagine the hassles that an OpenReader approach, with a standard consumer format and either no DRM or DRM Lite, could save for blind users like Guido Corona, mentioned above. Proprietary crap can wreak havoc on speech synthesizers. And while proprietary formats may theoretically allow read-aloud capabilities, the speech often won’t work because of technical problems or the wishes or fears of publishers.

But of course the DRM Mafia typically doesn’t care about the blind except from a PR perspective. They’re interested mainly in protecting their precious formats, regardless of the pain inflicted on blind and sighted readers alike.

Interesting stat: According to the article, a poll by the National Organization on Disability and the Harris Poll found that “only 32 percent of disabled Americans ages 18 to 64 are working, compared with 81 percent of those without disabilities in that age group. Two-thirds of the people with disabilities who were not working said they would like to have a job.” If you care about those issues and how tech could help, look no further than Blind Chance, David Faucheux’s audio Web log which we’re proud to host on the TeleRead site. You can bet that he’ll be addressing the format issue in the near future. Needless to say, a TeleRead-style approach could vastly increase the number of e-books available in accessible formats.

 
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