Good News / Bad News

There's been a couple of developments I've been tracking in the alternate format text world that bear sharing today.

The Good News

O'Reilly Books, prolific and well-respected publisher of tech books often used for computer science courses, has for some time been providing all of their texts to Bookshare to create accessible versions. Today, O'Reilly announced that they will add text DAISY formats of their books to their lineup of formating options. O'Reilly joins startup publisher FlatWorld Knowledge in the small cadre of publishers who offer books in formats that anyone, regardless of disability, can purchase in the same way, at the same time, and at the same (or lower!) price. Kudos, O'Reilly. We hope the big publishers learn from your example!

The Not-Quite-As-Good News, But Still Better Than It Was Before

The Blind Access Journal has thoroughly reviewed the Kindle 3's new accessibility features. If this is of interest to you, I highly recommend reading Larry's review. There's definitely both good news and bad news there. Bottom line - Kindle still has a way to go to get to equal access for their blind customers.

EBSCO Gets Built-In Reader (video post)

Some exciting news on the library front. EBSCO, the company that supplies the article database most commonly used in the SOU Hannon Library, has decided to partner with NextUp. This is good news for students who can benefit from hearing as well as seeing print, as it means you can have articles read aloud to you from wherever you access the EBSCO database. Details are available from EBSCO's press release.

I wanted to see how it worked, though, so here's what I found. Video seemed the best way to capture the experiment. (It does work in both Mac and PC environments, by the way.)