The RNIB are certainly campaigning for 'the same book, at the same
price, at the same time'. This means they want the full
unabridged accessible version published at the same time as the
standard print one and for the same price. Currently an
unabridged novel in a audio format costs about £60 compared to the
average price of a paperback at 7.99, and isn't published until 6-12
months afterwards. (Also, VAT is payable on audio and electronic
books but not on print ones.) It's much much worse for textbooks and
other non-fiction, many of which are never produced in anything other
than standard print. The one I mentioned before that the
publisher provided cost £50, but was then completely useless.
I'm only at the very early stages of my research, but the little I have
done and my own experience of being a visually impaired student and
meeting others suggests that most people who can't read standard print
do have to have things scanned and then reformatted, be it as
electronic plain text, large print, braille, etc. Its very time
consuming and pretty expensive, and even with the best OCR package in
the world a lot of careful proofreading is needed to avoid
mistakes. I spent the first year of my sociology degree thinking
I was supposed to be studying the 'modem age' as the software had
misinterpreted 'modern' in all my textbooks!
Emma Wright
University of Nottingham
School of Sociology and Social Policy
