[blindlaw] West Publishing

[James Pepper]

You don't have to buy their book, you can use other sources.  They are not
providing a necessary service.  What is a reasonable accessibility?  That
is not defined. Oh sure we have section 508 which makes documents legally
accessible but not actually accessible. The conditions right now is to make
some content accessible to the blind, it does not matter to the law that all
of the content is not accessible only parts of it.  And so you have this
horrible situation we have today where content is half accessible, there are
gaps and there is no incentive to fix this gap. Why should anyone help you
if they are not going to be paid to help you.  People have other things to
do than to work on making content free to the blind. This is an extremely
time consuming effort, it is not easy and you want it for free.  If there is
no incentive to help you other than the sense of trying to do something good
for people and when people like you are demanding that they do this stuff
with no reward then you get what you have today, nothing complete, content
that is partially accessible deemed to be accessible.  You have to rely on
organizations that are overeloaded with work to get out the content.  That
is the state of things today.

James

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 4:09 PM, Marc Workman <mworkman.lists at gmail.com>wrote:

> James said,
>
> West publishing owns their book.  Unless you want to seize people's
> property, then if they want to sell the product then that is up to them!
>
> Marc says,
> Is it up to them if they don't want to sell their books to black people? If
> you decide to sell your goods to the public, their are constraints placed on
> you.  Someone may own a restaurant, but ownership does not mean that she has
> no obligation to make the restaurant wheelchair accessible.  I think it's a
> legitimate argument to say that publishers who sell their books to the
> public have obligations to take reasonable steps to make their products
> accessible to people with print disabilities.  If taking these steps
> constitutes an undo hardship, which you seem to imply, then that's another
> question, but insisting on reasonable accommodations is not the same as
> seizing property.
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Pepper" <b75205 at gmail.com>
> To: "NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List" <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 2:00 PM
>
> Subject: Re: [blindlaw] West Publishing
>
>
>   What?  the costs of making a book accessible are excessive.  That is the
>> problem here.  Where do you get the idea that it is easy? Ah you hear
>> things
>> like you can make DAISY books in Microsoft Word well pal until you
>> actually
>> do it, you do not realize how much content goes missing.  All of this free
>> software that is designed for accessibility misses the mark.  Just look at
>> what we have now.  Are you happy with accessibility now.  Are we all done,
>> don't need to do any more work on this, everything is accessible now.
>>
>> If it were easy everyone would do it.  The problem here is that there are
>> half a dozen different formats for electronic books, not to mention all of
>> the free services that create books and each one of them, I repeat each
>> one
>> of them has to be laid out individually and that means the editors are
>> editing editions over and over again.  Until this gets standardized onto
>> one
>> format then publishers can challenge these laws telling them they have to
>> do
>> it for free.
>>
>> West publishing owns their book.  Unless you want to seize people's
>> property, then if they want to sell the product then that is up to them!
>>
>> James
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>
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