Yes, the Kindle ebook conversion involves using Calibre; I learned about this from a much younger than me blind person, and she could do it, no problem, whereas I just couldn't figure out how to do it with Jaws (it involves a lot of switching back and forth between the PC cursor and the Jaws cursor). Also, a lot of the younger blind people have no problem using certain versions of the iPod, perhaps the Touch?. I think learning second interface as an adult is much like learning a second language as an adult: you can do it to a certain degree, but it rarely becomes really intuitive.
I'm more peeved at Googlebooks than the Adobe products, which I have gotten pretty used to being inaccessible, but Google goes on and on to the public about how much they care about accessibility, and yet most of their products are completely inaccessible. And Googlebooks is the project which is using many of the university libraries, so if Googlebooks isn't being made accessible, it kind of feels as if the nation's libraries are being kept inaccessible.
Also, the Boston Public Library has a new e-card system which you can supposedly apply for and use online; want to take a guess as to whether that's accessible or not? I spent an hour one day trying to get in contact with the person who is in charge of the e-card, and I just got shuffled around from one person to another, and not one person even pretended to care about the issue.
I cheer myself up by reminding myself that some day soon there will be a tidalwave of visually-impaired baby boomers who have gotten pretty used to expecting things to be available to them. My phrase for this is "Come the revolution...".
Oh, and one of my housemates who recently got an iPad was asking me about public domain and copyright dates, and I said, good luck figuring that out. If you look at archive.org (which includes some, but not all, of the texts available through Googlebooks), it includes scans of books with copyrights in the 1950s, 1960s, and even more recent. I have no clue why this is, what the rationale is, and I've yet to find anyone else who can explain it, either. Is it all just arbitrary?
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Re: UD Rocks
Date: 2012-12-02 01:27 am (UTC)I'm more peeved at Googlebooks than the Adobe products, which I have gotten pretty used to being inaccessible, but Google goes on and on to the public about how much they care about accessibility, and yet most of their products are completely inaccessible. And Googlebooks is the project which is using many of the university libraries, so if Googlebooks isn't being made accessible, it kind of feels as if the nation's libraries are being kept inaccessible.
Also, the Boston Public Library has a new e-card system which you can supposedly apply for and use online; want to take a guess as to whether that's accessible or not? I spent an hour one day trying to get in contact with the person who is in charge of the e-card, and I just got shuffled around from one person to another, and not one person even pretended to care about the issue.
I cheer myself up by reminding myself that some day soon there will be a tidalwave of visually-impaired baby boomers who have gotten pretty used to expecting things to be available to them. My phrase for this is "Come the revolution...".
Oh, and one of my housemates who recently got an iPad was asking me about public domain and copyright dates, and I said, good luck figuring that out. If you look at archive.org (which includes some, but not all, of the texts available through Googlebooks), it includes scans of books with copyrights in the 1950s, 1960s, and even more recent. I have no clue why this is, what the rationale is, and I've yet to find anyone else who can explain it, either. Is it all just arbitrary?