A Blind Spot 
Despite XML's great promise in expediting the production of Braille
educational materials, politics and the profit motive are threatening to
stall its adoption. 

From: Software Development Magazine - November 2003 - page 64
By: Warren Keuffel 

In my American Heritage dictionary, one of the definitions of interface is "a
point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact." As engineers,
we work with a multitude of application interfaces, but another intersection
interests me even more: the point where technology meets society. 

Because I have a hearing impairment, I'm particularly alert to the ways that
technology impacts disabilities. Thanks to a chance encounter with a
professional working with vision-impaired elementary and secondary students,
I discovered that an unlikely political battle is brewing over the issue of
using XML to facilitate text-to-Braille translation. 

More than 10 million visually impaired Americans cannot read the newspapers,
books and magazines that the sighted take for granted. But translating print
media to auditory or tactile forms is no easy task. Certified transcribers
spend a year learning Braille, six months (with assistance) completing simple
projects such as novels, and an additional year specializing in
field-specific vocabularies for math, science or music. The production
process itself is time-consuming and requires multiple iterations between
transcriber and proofreader to complete, after which the Braille book is
manufactured and distributed. 

The advent of XML as a lingua franca for data exchange and meta-markup has
created the potential to release books simultaneously in print, audio and
Braille formats. The DAISY Consortium, for example, has collaborated with the
W3C to avoid reinventing the wheel: The Digital Talking Book uses the
publishers' XML-formatted files to produce text-to-speech e-books, thus
obviating the need for human readers. 

Only one problem prevents the blind and dyslexic from quick access to the
latest John Grisham: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. More than half of
the 50,000-plus e-book titles (which use programs such as Adobe Acrobat to
display the files) specifically lock out text-to-speech software. It's not
just the latest bestsellers that e-book publishers - citing piracy concerns -
have denied to those who need e-books, but also many titles in the public
domain. The American Foundation for the Blind has petitioned the U.S.
Copyright Office to exempt e-books from DMCA regulations, asserting that they
fall under the fair-use provisions of the Act. 

A related battle affects students at the nation's elementary and secondary
schools for the visually impaired. The IDEA legislation (Individuals with
Disabilities Act) mandates that the visually impaired have the right to a
quality education. Obtaining Braille versions of new textbooks in a timely
manner is just one obstacle schools face when attempting to meet the mandate. 

Nuances wreak havoc when it comes to transcribing textbooks to Braille: How
best to convert graphics (description, bas-relief or tactile graphics?) Is an
uppercase A a letter A or the first element in an alphabetical group?
Resolving these issues takes time - time that IDEA says infringes on
students rights. To further complicate matters, each state has its own
standards for Braille textbooks. And, for some small states, the number of
students who will use a given title may not make production cost-effective. 

As with e-books, the widespread use of XML has made it possible to
significantly automate the production of Braille textbooks. Again, working
with the W3C, advocates at the American Foundation for the Blind's Textbooks
and Instructional Materials Solutions Forum have leveraged those efforts to
leapfrog Braille production from ASCII files to the XML-driven 21st century.
By writing specialized Document Type Definitions, Braille producers can use
the same XML files that publishers use to drive typesetters to produce
Braille texts.  

The ultimate goal? To set a national standard. Sen. Dodd of Connecticut and
Rep. Petri of Wisconsin introduced the Instructional Materials Accessibility
Act of 2003. In addition to defining the format for publishers' electronic
files (codifying W3C XML standards) and requiring that all school districts
receive federal funds to adopt the standard, the bill also establishes a
clearinghouse for publishers and school districts. The bill passed the House,
but the clearinghouse provisions were eliminated and the Senate is now
considering the remaining provisions as part of a larger special-education
funding bill. 

Technology seldom advances in a vacuum. Often, resolving the interfaces
between technology and society is more difficult than creating the technology
itself. Write me directly at wkeuffel@acm.org, or post a message for all to
read at http://www.sdmagazine.com. 

(Thanks to Lorri Quigley of the Utah State Schools for the Deaf and Blind for
"opening my eyes" to these issues. Many of the issues mentioned here are
discussed at greater length in links listed at
http://www.tsbvi.edu/textbooks/index.htm.) 

