Jes: I'm not currently a student, but you have a vallid complaint. I wound up scanning a print textbook for a friend of mine after he purchased the e-book and found it inaccessible for the reasons you state. I'm not sure where one would start, but I would think about consulting disabled student services at your school, and also contact the NFB in Maryland to check out whether anyone there is addressing this issue. HTH Carolyn ----- Original Message ----- From: Jess To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 5:49 AM Subject: A call to action!
First, a question. How many people like to read books? I know I do. How many people were overjoyed that entire text books were going to be put online? I was. However, a lot of EBooks cannot be read by any screen reader we have today. Why? Simply put, the text of the book is contained within an OCR image, and there is a special reader required to read them. These are not your standard PDF files, and the books are protected by DRM, so there is no way to extract the contents into programs like text edit. As a book worm, I tried out the Kindle app for the IPhone, and was delighted to find that a book that I wanted to read was available on the Kindle store. However, my joy turned to bitter disappointment when I realized that while I could navigate the book's table of contents, cover, and chapters to an extent, the text was completely inaccessible. Furthermore, my text books for my classes were not usable. Ladies and gentlemen, I fear that unless we as blind consumers stand up, and demand that these publishers put their text books into standard native file formats, such as pdf or doc, we will lose a lot of access to books, and our chances to succeed at college will be severely diminished. So, anyone have any thoughts of what to do? I thought about starting a petition to ask Amazon to require their publishers to make their books usable, but figured that I would be a laughing stock for doing so, as most publishers probably wouldn't have the time to read, much less consider what I was asking for. My point is, as long as E texts get more and more graphical, our chances to read will be greatly impaired, and as more and more books become exclusively online, we will lose access to the latest editions of books altogether. Thoughts, anyone? You may also skype me at pianomagic88 Jes -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
