As I wrote about in today’s Profoundly Yours blog, a coalition of disability groups, led by the National Federation of the Blind, is planning a protest march outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York Tuesday. The Guild had earlier criticized the text-to-speech feature, arguing it could undermine the market for audiobooks without compensating authors and publishers — prompting a partial backdown from the Seattle online retailing giant Amazon. Now the disability groups are demanding the full activation of text-to-speech, which they say gives visually-impaired people equal access to electronic books.
[...] see the Guild’s actions as harmful to access for persons who are reading disabled. Today, disability groups will protest at the Guild’s headquarters in New York [...]