Industry committee  If your doctoral colleague were still working today, I guarantee you his world would be much different from what it was when you were in school. As to the question of why it is still so hard, sir, if I had that answer I wouldn't be talking to you today. This wouldn't be a conver

Industry committee  —but not in that shop. If I could have access to the magazines available in the shop or the bookstore down the street, I guarantee you that I would be spending a lot more money on consuming media. I don't spend much money, in fact I don't spend any money on media, because the th

Industry committee  I think, at source, if the book were made available in a format that could be made easily accessible.... The ideal scenario, the world that we're envisioning, is that I walk into a Coles, I put my $20 down and say that I want this as a DAISY book or as an electronic Braille copy.

Industry committee  I would suggest self-publishing. There's a gentleman in my office in Calgary who lost his sight as a result of having water on the brain. I think it's hydrocephaly. He went from having normal vision to being legally blind literally overnight. He self-published a book that you can

Industry committee  That's a really good question. I think the short answer is no. No one tracks it. Someone brings a book to market, and their job is to convince as many people as possible to buy it. Some of those people may or may not have a print disability. I think to keep it in context, if you

Industry committee  I think the short answer is no. I don't think anyone really has studied that, but I would simply point to the situation around employment of persons with disabilities. Can you tie that back strictly to barriers around copyright? Probably not, but is the ability to obtain accessib

Industry committee  I'd say that you found it frustrating listening to it; imagine living it. Whether that be a professional career step that someone is trying to take, whether it be buying a book on gardening, or some hobby that people want to leverage to improve the quality of their life, I don't

Industry committee  As I understand it, and perhaps Mr. Rae can clarify this, if I attend a post-secondary institution in Canada, I buy the book from the bookstore. The university can then burst it, scan it, and give it to me in an alternate format without incurring any penalties or fees, or be in j

Industry committee  No one is using the IBM Selectric to produce books anymore.

Industry committee  In our opinion, sir, no. We don't apply reasonable effort to make buildings accessible. We don't say, “You must put in a ramp or you must provide a door opener only if it doesn't create an undue hardship”. We don't say that. We say, “Buildings must be accessible and usable by eve

Industry committee  In DRM?

Industry committee  It's impossible. It's impossible, because unless you want to reverse engineer a DRM product, you then run the risk of contravening not only the law, even though you are entitled to do so for accessibility purposes.... Once you start tampering with electronic files, you run the ri

Industry committee  Yes, it does exist. There are free programs. One is called Seeing AI, which is an artificial-intelligence app that Microsoft put out. It's a prototype development platform they're trying to use to tweak artificial intelligence. A few years ago, the National Federation of the Bli

Industry committee  I have the Seeing AI app on my phone. It's great. I tried using it in the hotel room last night to tell me whether it was shampoo or body lotion, not exactly Ultimate Format materials, but it gives you a sense of the.... Hopefully I didn't use...anyhow, it doesn't matter.

Industry committee  We laugh, but these things are real. You go into a hotel room and there's a deluge of leaflets on your bed. You go onto a plane and they encourage you to read the safety briefing card. You go to a university and they ask you to pick your courses from a calendar, and so on and so