[blindlaw] West Publishing

Mon Aug 30 16:34:02 UTC 2010

James said,
You don't have to buy their book, you can use other sources.  They are not 
providing a necessary service.

Marc says,
You don't have to come into my restaurant.  There are other restaurants with 
ramps.  I am not providing a necessary service, so I have no obligation to 
make my restaurant accessible.  Would you accept this argument?

James said,
What is a reasonable accessibility?  That is not defined.

Marc says,
My guess is you meant reasonable accommodation, but the fact that it is not 
defined does not mean service providers are absolved of all obligations. 
This is why courts, human rights tribunals, legislators, and so on exist, to 
define and clarify concepts like reasonable accommodation, undo hardship, 
discrimination, etc.

James said,
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.

Marc says,
Why should I build a ramp so you can get in my restaurant? I have other 
things to do than to build free ramps for wheelchair users.

James said,
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.

Marc says,
Building ramps is an extremely time-consuming effort.  It is not easy, and 
you want it for free.  Therefore, I have no obligation to make my restaurant 
accessible.  Do you think this is an acceptable argument?

There is, of course, an incentive.  It's a negative one: if you don't take 
reasonable steps to make your product accessible, in accordance with the 
law, then you will be penalized, and you will no longer be able to sell your 
product.  Sounds like a pretty good incentive to me.  If I'm a racist, what 
is my incentive to sell my product to people of different races? It is 
certainly not to be nice.  My incentive is the same as that noted above: if 
I choose to discriminate, then I can't sell my product in America, period.

You can argue that making printed books accessible costs *too* much, that it 
*does* constitute an undo hardship.  I doubt that, but for all I know it 
could be the case.  What you can't do, at least not if you want to 
consistently maintain that unjustifiable discrimination in the market place 
is wrong, is say that, because it's expensive, or because it's not easy, or 
because I'm insisting on equal access at an equal price, there are no 
obligations to take reasonable steps to make products and services 
accessible to all consumers.

Best,

Marc
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Pepper" <b75205 at gmail.com>
To: "NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List" <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 8:32 AM
Subject: Re: [blindlaw] West Publishing

> 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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