Barrier Free Information
January 2002: Challenges to Barrier Free Information
As clear progress is made in the creation of core standards that promote information accessibility on the World Wide Web, it seems that the rapid pace of technological change keeps raising new barriers as we knock down the old.
Over the coming months, we will be exploring the spectrum of challenges and solutions in the field of information accessibility. Among the topics to be covered are:
- Information Access as a fundamental human right
- Digital Rights Management
- Proprietary Presentation Formats
- Patents and Intellectual Property
- Emerging Technologies such as Digital Television
As we rush into an ever more digitally defined age, we must not forget the importance of including all of the world's people in the shared promise and resource of information. Irrespective of geo-political constraints, we must all work to ensure:
- The right of an individual to access and read information, in a modality appropriate to their physical and cognitive ability, is fundamental.
- The intellectual property rights of information authors must be respected.
- The fundamental right to information access, where allowed under law, shall not be infringed through the application of intellectual property protection mechanisms.
How might this happen? Let us examine a scenario in which a publisher creates an electronic book on Agriculture. It is authored using HTML 4.01, according to the W3C Web Content Authoring Guidelines, and uses Cascading Style Sheets to separate the presentation from the content. Next, the document is processed using a proprietary conversion tool to create a secured and compressed version that can be distributed and read on a variety of devices using proprietary browsing software. It further happens that this proprietary software is significantly less accessible than a screen reader and standard web browser which could read the original HTML source document. In fact, in the conversion to the distribution format, much of the useful accessibility information in the source document is discarded and no longer available, even if the proprietary reading software knew what to do with it.
A far fetched scenario? No. Just recall Adobe PDF, and then consider the competing eBook file formats from GemStar and Microsoft. The problem is real, and likely to get worse as the developers of the content tools and viewing technology rush to protect content and to avoid Napster-like scenarios where content is freely shared with no respect for intellectual property.
What is the answer? We have seen Microsoft and Adobe provide text to speech synthesis capabilities directly in their eBook reading systems. In effect, these two reading systems are self-voicing and accessible to the visually impaired without the need of a screen reader. This approach keeps the reading system closed from the prying eyes of assistive software (and potentially hackers) while maintaining content protection. However, both Microsoft and Adobe have left the door open to content publishers to place restrictions on their eBooks that disable text to speech synthesis for a given title. The result is the unsettling effect that even though your reading system is accessible, and the source content itself is technically accessible, a publisher can deny access to the accessible version. In this case, security is not the issue. Instead, the issue is audio book rights, and the fact that publishers have traditionally viewed text and audio versions as separate, and that a book licensed for delivery in an eBook format may not have the corresponding audio rights, and therefore, in principle, cannot be read with synthetic speech.
So, as progress is made in accessibility, from improving end-user software with innovative self-voicing, to wide-spread use of document formats that facilitate rendering into alternate formats, new barriers to information access for all keep appearing. It is hoped that the publishing community will work with the disability community to knock down this latest barrier. We all have a right to read and technology or outmoded thinking should not get in the way.
Author: Markku T. Hakkinen