E-Book Legal Restrictions Are Screwing Over Blind People

[Commentary] For the nearly 8 million people in the US with some degree of vision impairment, the advent of e-books 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 e-books 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. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is an incredible tool for making the collective digital library more accessible, but publishers argued that TTS would negatively impact the audiobook market, and that a computer reading an e-book aloud constituted a violation of copyright. 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.