[gui-talk] Fwd: National Federation of theBlind CommendsAmazonon Unveiling of New Accessible Kindle

[James Pepper]

The big problem is that ebook formats are just not there yet and publishers
have to lay out books in many different formats to publish their books.  It
is a nightmare, each e-book format has a different layout.  There are like
12 main ebook formats right now.  This adds costs to the books and they are
not allowed to make any money off of selling them to the blind. So its just
really expensive, tedious and time consuming and if you do not do it right,
content goes missing.  And the only way to know that content is missing is
to check it with a screen reader and very few people do that!

I am laying out a book right now, we have to lay it out for print and then
the electronic versions.  Print was easy compared to the others.  epub which
has a big crowd of accessibility experts claiming it is the second coming is
going extinct, nobody wants to use it because it is a pain in the neck.
People are going towards Mobi right now but to lay that out you have to do
it out of house, not in-house and publishers do not want to let go of their
rights to their books, it is how they make their money.

So the state of things is not as it seems, it is not there yet.  Even if you
get a book laid out for the kindle there is no guarantee the content read to
the screen reader will be formatted correctly.  Just look at all the lost
content in creating DAISY books.  If you do not lay out content correctly
the first time around, content goes missing.  Oh sure the first few pages
get done right, but who really checks a book to see if all of it converted.
People seem to think it is OK for content to go missing but why should you
have half of a book, why not have the whole thing.

James