How does COCOA help the blind and visually impaired?
An unfortunate victim in all this are the blind and visually impaired. There’s a non-profit, charitable organization called BookShare.org that provides books in digital form to those with visual or other print disabilities. BookShare.org operates under the “Reproduction for the blind” section of US copyright law, which says they can offer such a service if they meet certain criteria. Bookshare offers text-to-speech software, etc. Having access to the books all these CDA’s have scanned would increase BookShare’s collection more than ten-fold — a gigantic improvement for the visually impaired. The problem is that Google and Amazon won’t provide their scanned images to BookShare.org because of all the problems flying around. I’ve been told that if we can solve this problem — to which COCOA is the solution — then the roadblocks in BookShare’s path are removed.
