[gui-talk] schools shun Kindle

[Hoffman, Allen]

James Pepper wrote:

"Well it is actually more than the user interface that is inaccessible
here and so that is going to be a problem.  It is actually the layout of
the content and that problem is not an overnight solution. All the
publishers face this same problem, do you allow your content to be
published in an accessible format by an outside source or do you do this
in-house.  Of course it is very expensive to do this in-house and so the
current solutions are the Bookshare and other types of formats.  So the
books available are the ones the publishers don't mind if they the loose
sales revenues and not the new books."

 

I don't follow all of these comments.  Copyrights law allows production
in specialized formats without permission.  Publishers may have the
perspective that creation of accessible content is expensive, however,
for most content, it only requires attention to standards when doing the
typesetting process.  For complex materials such as mathematics,
computer programming, and diagrammatically intensive content, additional
effort must be made to provide the accessibility attributes, but the
overhead really is not significant in the total cost of content
production, especially when compared with projected revenues from sales.