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

[Claude Almansi]

Hi Paul, Manon and All

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Paul Lehto <lehto.paul@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

You are right on that: the Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature seems to
have been conceived as a sales gimmick by Amazon, without any
consideration for people who really need to access books in non-visual
manner: no way to read the Kindle 2's e-books with a braille bar,
because their format is proprietary - and anyway the Kindle 2 is DRM'd
to prevent transfer to a computer with the necessary accessive
software to command a Braille bar.

So yes, Amazon messed up the access for all issue by presenting
text-to-speech as a gimmick to use when you are driving (not a good
idea anyway: radio listening already causes many car accidents, and
the concentration needed to follow a written instead of spoken text,
moreover read in a computerized voice, is much greater) and by DRMing
the device and its texts.

However the Authors' Guild definition of text-to-speech as an audio
performance that should be covered by separate rights is the bigger
danger presently to the right for all to access books, and thus must
be tackled first. The page on Kindle issues of the International
Centre for Disabilities Resources on the Internet
<http://www.icdri.org/legal/Kindle_Issues.htm> says: "At this time,
Random House has disabled text to speech on all of its ebooks." (this
time being March 16, 09). And Random House books represent a helluva
slice of the book market. Hence the importance of the Reading Rights
Coalition's petition.

After that, sure, it will be necessary to seriously  the DRM issues of
Amazon's Kindle and proprietary format of its e-books: and they
concern us all, not only people with reading disabilities: what if
Amazon goes belly up?

Re your other points below, I'll let others more conversant with these
issues answer you. Just one thing: in Switzerland, electronic voting
is just one more possibility added to normal in-presence voting and
voting by correspondance. And electronic voting and vote by
correspondance are submitted to the same citizens' scrutiny as
in-presence voting.

Best

Claude


> 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. =C2=A0Some example=
s
> 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? =C2=A0 Would the=
y?
> =C2=A0:)
>
> 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. =C2=A0 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. =C2=A0Such a system has to be visible and simple, and variatio=
ns
> 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