President’s Blog

The Government is conducting a review of special education. We have submitted our views on the points raised by the review and we have contributed to a submission on behalf of the blindness sector. Last week Martine Abel and I appeared in person in front of the review panel to speak in support of our submission. Amongst the panel members was the Associate Minister for Education, Hon. Heather Roy.

First and foremost, like all other students, blind and low vision students have a right to be educated to their maximum potential. This is the principle that guides our approach to this topic. (more…)

In this third posting in my series on access by blind people to everyday published information, I will briefly discuss the concept of copyright exemptions and explain why they are needed.

The starting point is to understand how blind people access information. Because publishers almost never publish books in an accessible format, it falls essentially to the mostly voluntary blindness agencies around the world to apply their own resources to create accessible versions of books. According to the World Blind Union’s Right to Read campaign, (more…)

In this second posting in my series on access by blind people to everyday published information, I will look briefly at the situation that developed earlier this year when Amazon released its Kindle 2, and what we learned from that.

Amazon is a well-known publisher of electronic books or e-books. These books are electronic files you read using a portable electronic device often called an e-book reader. In Amazon’s case, their reader is called the Kindle. The second iteration of the Kindle, the Kindle 2, was released in February this year. This caused considerable controversy in the blind and intellectual property communities as I will explain shortly. (more…)

Sorry if this post is a bit long, but this is a complex subject. It also explains why it is several weeks since I updated the blog; I have just had to do a bit more research and give a lot of thought to this before I felt ready to publish. So here goes.

It seems to me that as technology keeps “improving”, it is actually becoming more difficult for blind and low vision people to do our business on the net. It should be the other way around because the net, if well managed, offers huge potential for blind people to do business in a way that is more inclusive than ever. So why are we heading in the wrong direction? (more…)