Hi all,
I am a dyslexic who has difficulty in reading and writing, however the advances in technology have enabled me and people like me the ability to engage with books, manuals and documents using text to speech packages. Whilst it is true that screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and others have an ability to read the textual representations on a screen, they are not ideal (such as having difficulty in dealing with text flow), and there very essence is designed with visually impaired users in mind and not the dyslexic. The software of choice for the dyslexic (well for me at least) is Read and Write by Texthelp - a package that enables user such as me to properly read documents in a variety of formats and layouts, plus many other features, such as word highlighting, screen masking, dictionary lookups etc. etc.
Read and Write has a plug-in called PDFAloud that attaches itself to a standard Acrobat Reader or Editor to enable the user to read a PDF, however, with the advent of publishers wanting to secure their copyright by creating things like secure PDFs, this facility is not able to work in the correct fashion. It has therefore stopped people like me from being able to get the most out of those documents as the reading software no longer has the ability to read the text within the page in a sensible format (yes, Read and Write has screen reading abilities, but as mentioned these are not ideal). By locking out such software to read the documents natively, you are effectively excluding a whole group of users that have specific learning difficulties. In some circles this could be seen as discriminatory.
We need a way for software manufacturers and publishers to communicate in order that all users across all groups are catered for in the correct fashion, and not simply as a way for publishers to protect their own interests. It should not be difficult for companies like Adobe to provide the platform on which publishers can securely release electronic printed material, yet also provide the ability for third party developers to interact with that platform and thus help users who have specific needs. Crikey, if I wanted to copy the material, I could simply screen dump it - you are never going to stop a determined user from copying copyrighted material, but you are going to severely limit the ability of users with needs.
Chris