[A2k] Sign on to Reading Rights Petition: Allow Everyone Access to E-books!

[Paul Lehto]

I support access for the blind to books.

However, let's not forget that the deaf/blind community is so often
ignored (Helen Keller) and they will not benefit from text to speech
at all.  As pointed out in my previous post, while not at all opposing
access to knowledge for the blind, we must be VERY careful about
implications created when these technologies spill over into areas
where they are not needed for the access to knowledge.  Some examples
include:

(1) Computerizing information that need not be computerized makes it
inscrutable to almost everyone, kind of like if government responded
to FOIA requests in Greek, which is like responding to FOIA requests
in FORTRAN or Advanced Basic.

(2) Requiring everyone to vote on or have their votes counted on
computerized machines, a necessity for the disabled but not for the
non-disabled, renders us all "blind" so to speak and unable to
exercise our most important birthrights of self-government: the
ability to monitor, verify and control in real-time that election
results are correct and non-corrupt.

Hey, the stakes in US elections are merely those of control of the
world's richest nation, control of the world's sole military
superpower, as well as control over hundreds of life and death
political issues for various sides of the debates of the age, so
NOBODY would have any incentive to strike a blow for justice, or for
their own power, or for a lot of money, now, would they?   Would they?
  :)

Again, the key here is the scope in which electronic access is
accepted as a substitute for the real thing, and the obfuscation that
occurs to the average person whenever simple processes are
computerized.

Jeff Williams asked for a definition of "average person" and I'd
define it as "someone who is not a computer expert" for the purposes
of this context.   In fact the German Federal Constitutional Court
just recently ruled that "public elections" requires that the public
may not be burdened by having to have any "expert technical knowledge"
in order to observe the vote counts and "all essential steps" of the
voting process.

Thus, Germany just removed electronic voting that was being used for
millions of Germans and will revert to a system that honors the most
important rights of democracy: transparency and voter control of
elections.  Such a system has to be visible and simple, and variations
on physical (usually paper) ballots, publicly counted in open
meetings, are the only voting systems that comply with the minimum
requirements of freedom and democracy.

Paul

On 4/3/09, Manon Ress <manon.ress@keionline.org> wrote:
> Allow Everyone Access to E-books
>
> Target:
> The Authors Guild
> Sponsored by:
> The Reading Rights Coalition
>
> When Amazon released the Kindle 2 electronic book reader on February
> 9, 2009, the company announced that the device would read e-books
> aloud using text-to-speech technology.  Under pressure from the
> Authors Guild, Amazon has announced that it will give authors and
> publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any
> or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2.
>
> The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read
> print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech
> function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors
> Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7,
> 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m.  The coalition includes the organizations
> that represent the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning
> or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord
> injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the
> addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time
> easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books.
>
> Sign the petition here:
>
> http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/We-Want-To-Read
>
>
>
>
>
> ***************************************************************************
> Manon Ress
> manon.ress@keionline.org
> Knowledge Ecology International
> 1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
> Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Fax: +1.202.332.2673
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul@gmail.com
906-204-2333
309-413-6541 fax