Esther,
Two questions.
Does the author's guild have statistical evidence that the average mac
product user even knows that voiceover is there let alone that they would
opt for this behavior?
I might point out that audiobooks, commercial ones were not created for the
vision challenged population, but for the general public, so the argument
that a vision challenged person would opt for a voiceover edition
instead of a commercial one, seems well silly. They have figures to
document what percentage of the billions of audiobooks sold are sold to individuals with vision
loss? After all, that population was serviced via nls and other programs
for decades, with commercial audio books selling just fine.
lastly, would not creating an access specific format not solve that issue
then? there would be no risk of random audio hungry people learning how
to use voiceover just so they can avoid listening to a real person read an
audio book.
Not picking on you, just wanting your thoughts since you understand their
logic.
Karen
On Sat, 24 Mar 2012, James Mannion wrote:
Which is why this stupid nonsense will probably rob us of access in
the name of their closed minded greed until the old members of the
gild all die and we get minds in there with open minds to a moddern
world perspective. The good part is there excessive greed will put
them under extra stress which will drive them to the grave sooner.
On 3/22/12, Esther <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Ray,
You're correct that the policy of blocking VoiceOver access to eBook content
in the Kindle app arises from the Author's Guild suit, but the guild is
mostly worried about readers who are not visually impaired making use of
these text-to-speech capabilities to listen to ebooks instead of buying
audiobooks. It's the very fact that Apple has been building in VoiceOver
capabilities into every iOS device and computer that constitutes the danger,
from their point of view. That's why a Kindle app for the PC, that can be
used with screen readers like JAWS, has been released, but there is no
similar application for the Mac. If the only way that you could access the
Kindle ebook content on your computer was by investing in blindness-specific
software that equals or exceeds the cost of your computer, it's pretty hard
to argue that you configured your machine this way just to avoid buying the
audiobook versions. But the fact that every iPhone, iPod Touch, an iPad now
support VoiceOver, and that the same is true for every Mac, means that any
user of an iPhone, Mac, etc. could enable VoiceOver functionality in reading
Kindle ebooks, if this capability were not explicitly blocked.
And so, if you carry the argument of the Author's Guild to its natural
conclusion, non-visually impaired Kindle customers who find VoiceOver's
reading "good enough" to listen to, will turn on this feature instead of
buying audiobook versions that they would otherwise purchase.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Mar 22, 2012, at 4:03 PM, Ray Foret Jr wrote:
That's not quite true. It's not because of copy right. The truth is
this. It's because of the Author's guild. They don't want the blind to
be able to read their books without extra costs. Their twisted reasoning
is that the text to speech tecnhology will rob them of sales. Every
single organization of the blind is fighting this stipid infantile logic.
Sincerely,
The Constantly Barefooted Ray!!!
Now a very proud and happy Mac user!!!
Skype name:
barefootedray
Facebook:
facebook.com/ray.foretjr.1
On Mar 22, 2012, at 8:39 PM, Hank Smith wrote:
so because of stupid drm copy write crap the blind can't read the ebooks?
On 3/22/2012 6:30 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi Jeff,
There are a number of ebook apps that specifically disable VoiceOver's
ability to access the content in order to preserve digital rights
management. This is also true if you try to use the Barnes & Noble Nook
app, for example. You'll notice that usually you can access everything
except for the actual content of the text. That's being blocked. You
can verify this by taking a screen capture, and sending the results to
an OCR app like Prizmo or TextGrabber. The OCR app will tell you what
the contents are, but obviously you're not going to read the book by
screen capturing every page and sending it to an OCR app.
If you want to read another example of this viewpoint, that the ability
of screen readers to access text would promote copyright violation, take
a look at Greg Kearney's posted response from Fictionwise in the
archives, sent in reply to his inquiry about ebook accessibility for
their ebook reading app just a few months after the iPhone 3GS was
released with VoiceOver support:
• Fwd: Response for Support Ticket #102495
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg06200.html
Since this is the Mail Archive post, if you're reading on your computer,
you can also use access key shortcuts of Control-N to read down the
thread for other reader comments.
Best,
Esther
On Mar 22, 2012, at 2:59 PM, Ray Foret Jr wrote:
Forget it. It ain't gonna happen.
It ain't accessible at all.
Sincerely,
The Constantly Barefooted Ray!!!
Now a very proud and happy Mac user!!!
Skype name:
barefootedray
Facebook:
facebook.com/ray.foretjr.1
On Mar 22, 2012, at 7:38 PM, Jeff Berwick wrote:
Hi All,
I downloaded the Kindle app so I can read some of the books that my
wife is reading. I can't, however, figure out how to get it to work.
Has anybody had success with the Kindle app? Is it accessible? Any
tips?
It looks like, to me, that it is displaying images instead of
rendering the text.
Thx,
Jeff
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