taken from the Braille Monitor, February 2015
Ebook Legal Restrictions Are Screwing Over Blind People
by Kyle Wiens
From the Editor: Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit, an
online repair community and parts retailer internationally renowned for
their open source repair manuals and product teardowns. His opinion piece
originally appeared on December 15, 2014, on WIRED.com. He graciously gave
his permission for us to reprint it. As you can tell, he gets it. Here is
what he says:
In late 2012 a fourteen-year-old high school student stood in front
of a camera and began to read. Chris Nusbaum's voice was calm and steady.
And so were his hands, which ran smoothly over lines of Braille as he made
a personal appeal to Amazon-maker of the most widely-used e-reader in the
world.
"My class has just been assigned a project for which we must use
information in the class's textbook. Every student has a Kindle, which has
the textbook loaded on to it. All of the sighted students can easily read
the material and complete the assignment independently," Nusbaum read. "I,
on the other hand, cannot read the book without the assistance of a sighted
reader. Therefore, I am put at a severe disadvantage in completing the
project when compared with my sighted classmates... All of this because of
a problem which can easily and inexpensively be solved by integrating text-
to-speech software into your readers and making sure that your apps and
information are accessible with that software."
For the nearly eight million people in the US with some degree of
vision impairment, the advent of ebooks and e-readers has been both a
blessing and a burden: a blessing because a digital library-everything from
academic textbooks to venerated classics to romance novels-is never further
away than your fingertips; a burden because the explosion of ebooks has
served as a reminder of how inaccessible technology really can be.
For more than a decade the visually impaired have been locked in an
excruciatingly slow and circuitous battle against US copyright laws. And
it's left the visually impaired with few options but to hack their way
around digital barriers-just for the simple pleasure of reading a book.
Books, Blindness, and Barriers to Content
There's no Library of Alexandria out there for visually-impaired
readers. Only 1 percent of published books are available in Braille. And,
while audiobooks are widely available through online platforms like
Audible, the selection is relatively narrow. Audible boasts more than
150,000 titles, but that's only 4 percent of the estimated 3.4 million
books that are available through Amazon. If you're looking for an
independent author, or the collected stories of a minor, long-dead
novelist, or a biography on anyone less celebrated than a celebrity or a
world leader-you're probably out of luck.
Still, many popular books are available on venues like Audible, so we
asked Blake Reid-head of the Samuelson Glushko Technology Law & Policy
Clinic-whether that was enough. Reid's team works on media and
accessibility issues; they explained: "Yes, audiobooks are already on the
market. But there are not very many of them and virtually none for
technical or academic subjects."
That's why ebooks and e-readers are especially promising for people
with disabilities. There are well over a million ebooks in the Kindle's
Store alone-everything from cookbooks to magazines to how-to books. A lot
of e-readers come prepackaged with a Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature, which
converts the words on an e-reader's screen into a synthesized, human voice.
Essentially, TTS reads a purchased ebook aloud-and that's been an
incredible tool for making the collective digital library more accessible
and more inclusive.
That is, until the copyright hounds got out.
When the Kindle 2 was released in 2009, it came with TTS functions
that could be used across all Kindle ebooks. Publishers balked. They argued
that TTS would negatively impact the audiobook market, and that a computer
reading an ebook aloud constituted a violation of copyright.
Amazon conceded, and it gave publishers the option to opt-out of TTS.
Publishers took advantage of this and removed this feature from a huge
swath of books. And so, the doors to the collective digital library slammed
shut on the blind and print impaired once again.
"Blind people, when we ask for accessibility, we're not doing it
because we want anyone's charity," Chris told us. "We want equal access to
the same information that anyone else could have access to. We have the
mental capacity to compete on equal terms in education and in the workforce
and in any other areas of life with our sighted counterparts. In order to
do that, we are just asking for a very simple request from developers and
engineers and institutions of higher education: and that is make sure that
we have access to information that we need. We'll take care of the rest."
The situation has improved since Chris made his appeal to Amazon two
years ago. TTS features have gotten more prevalent-but there are still
critical accessibility gaps that need filling.
"Among the three main ebook distributors-Apple, Amazon, and Barnes &
Noble, text-to-speech support is limited. While Apple's iPad has built-in
text-to-speech functionality that works well with most formats of ebooks,
including Apple's own iBooks format, most Kindle devices do not," Reid's
team explained. "Only the Kindle Fire has text-to-speech functionality,
which can be (and often is) blocked by individual ebook publishers using
DRM. Also, it is often difficult for readers who are visually impaired to
determine which Kindle books have text-to-speech functionality disabled
before purchase."
DRM, or digital rights management, is a genteel term for digital
handcuffs; it's used to control access to copyrighted material. In ebooks
DRM stops pirates and profiteers from making thousands of copies of
something like Tina Fey's autobiography and then selling them for cents on
the dollar. Fair enough. But, when it comes to accessibility, DRM becomes a
barrier that can stop a reader with disabilities from listening to a good
book.
Hacking for the Right to Read
That's not to say that locks can't be picked. Over the years the
print impaired have found viable workarounds-hacks to pry open the doors to
their digital library.
If a tablet doesn't have a text-to-speech feature, you can modify it:
root the tablet and install a TTS app not sanctioned by the manufacturer.
More commonly, though, people just strip the DRM off ebooks they buy. Then
the ebook can be uploaded to and read through an e-reader's existing TTS
feature. The problem is that both those workarounds are technically illegal
under an esoteric clause in US copyright law.
Here's why: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law
designed to protect digital content from infringement. Under Section 1201
it's illegal to break a technological lock that protects copyrighted
content-like an encryption over a tablet or DRM over an ebook. So, it's not
just a voided warranty that would-be readers have to worry about: Web-
connected e-readers are essentially tablets, and you can't legally root or
jailbreak a tablet-even if you just want to trick it out with a cool app
that extends the device's accessibility or functionality.
Breaking the DRM on an ebook is also technically a violation-but the
Librarian of Congress granted an exemption for people who are visually
impaired or have a print impairment. But the ruling is interestingly
idiosyncratic: it's legal for someone with a disability to strip DRM from
ebooks, but it's not legal for developers to create programs or apps that
strip DRM.
And the exemption isn't permanent. Every three years advocates have
to request the Librarian of Congress to extend his previous exemptions.
Which means that people with disabilities are, essentially, legally
mandated to ask for permission to read a book once every three years, which
is what they've done for more than a decade.
And now it's time to ask again. Reid's team at the University of
Colorado submitted, in conjunction with the American Foundation for the
Blind and the American Council of the Blind, the petition to renew the
current exemption.
"In a seemingly endless loop that calls to mind the dilemma of Bill
Murray's character in the movie Groundhog Day, we, our colleagues, and our
pro bono counsel have poured hundreds of hours of work into a lengthy
bureaucratic process that requires us to document and re-document the
accessibility of copyrighted works," said Mark Richert of the American
Foundation for the Blind during a congressional hearing into the DMCA, "and
argue and re-argue the rarely-disputed premise that making books and movies
accessible to people with disabilities does not infringe or even remotely
threaten the rights of copyright holders."
Advocates narrowly procured the exemption for ebook DRM over the
objection of the register of copyright when they applied in 2010. This year
it's anyone's guess-and that's part of the problem.
Copyright law is taking away our rights. It means that developers are
afraid of writing applications to help the blind. It means that consumers
are afraid of repairing and tinkering with their things. And it means
people with visual impairments like Chris don't know if they'll be able to
keep listening to some of their books.
"For me if I could describe text-to-speech in one word, it would be
liberating," said Chris, now sixteen and a junior in high school. "It's a
kind of freedom. I, as a blind person, don't have access always to most
kinds of information that sighted people have access to. It's a kind of
freedom when I know that I have access to that information."
Reading is a basic human right, and no one-not the Library of
Congress and not corporate copyright lobbyists-should have the power to
take that away.
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