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

[Chris Friend]

Dear Paul,


The World Blind Union's Global Right to Read Campaign has the interests of
the deaf-blind embedded in our objectives.  Our campaign has as its vision
'Same book, same price and same day'

We are working in parallel with both WIPO for a global legislative
framework, and with Publishers and Rights Holders   to produce accessible
formats including braille, large print and audio.  Obviously the Kindle
issue is tagged to our drive for audio, but our parallel drive for braille
is of course embracing both hard copy braille and electronic refreshable
braille which is much in use today.


The Kindle's accessibility  was not perfect  but it was a step in the right
direction and we were hoping through negotiations with Amazon to persuade
them to improve its accessibility in due course.


But rest assured that the reading accessibility needs of those with
deaf-blindness are uppermost in our mind as we develop our R2R Campaign.

 With kind regards,

Chris.

Christopher Friend
WBU Strategic Objective Leader - Accessibility
Chair WBU Global Right to Read Campaign

Programme Development Advisor
Sightsavers International



-----Original Message-----
From: a2k-admin@lists.essential.org [mailto:a2k-admin@lists.essential.org]
On Behalf Of Paul Lehto
Sent: 04 April 2009 17:17
To: Manon Ress
Cc: a2k discuss list
Subject: Re: [A2k] Sign on to Reading Rights Petition: Allow Everyone Access
to E-books!

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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> A2k mailing list
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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
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