So, let me explain this a bit.

The defenders of CripTax prices will say that those prices cover the cost of production. This is, without a doubt, true. I work at a university where we often have to take written materials and convert them into braille – it takes a LOT of people hours, special software, and a braille embosser.

But those defenders of higher prices are reversing the argument to justify fleecing disabled readers.

What do I mean by that?

Braille is not magic. It is done by taking plain text and feeding it through fairly affordable translation software, creating a document that can easily be printed in braille.

All that time and effort and special software? IS NOT FOR THE BRAILLE.

It is to take the document provided by the publisher (usually in PDF format, the same file they send to the printers) and turn it into plain, unadorned text, by hand. Text has to be “stripped” (OCR/text recognition); images have to be described; footnotes have to be embedded; special pullouts and other formatting shifted or removed. 

Printing in braille is cheap; reverse engineering a finished text to print it in braille IS NOT.

Same with those audio books. After a book is completed and, often, after it has already been published, the publisher arranges to have the book recorded by a professional voice actor/reader, which usually also involves a recording producer, if not a recording studio, which all stacks up to $$, no two ways about it.

However: that cost? IS RARELY FACTORED INTO THE BUDGET OF PRINTING A BOOK.

Oh, it might be, if the author is JK Rowling and it is well known that readers will want audio versions right away. But most of the time, nope, the audio book is produced only after the hard copy book has become a decent seller, and so it’s an extra cost which is claimed must be covered by making the audio version extra expensive to buy. (Even then it’s somewhat ridiculous, since honestly, creating an audio book is, in the end, cheaper than printing, factoring in the cost of paper.)

If publishers factored audio book production into the assumed costs of publishing a book, they would have very little reason to price it higher.

If publishers factored in creating a “plain text” file – including having editors/authors describe images – that could be used to print braille copies or to be used with refreshable braille readers (electronic pinboards, basically), then there would be zero reason to price those books higher.

tl;dr:
Yes, it’s a #criptax, and the excuse that “those formats are more expensive to produce so they have to be priced higher” is only true if you completely throw out the premise that publishers have an obligation to account for disabled readers when they are actually budgeting for and publishing the book.

I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is exactly the sort of argument thatpeople try to use to justify inaccessibility in all kinds of areas. When we tell a company that their website or appliance or piece of technology isn’t accessible, they frequently tell us that they are sorry to hear that but that the accessibility is too expensive and time-consuming to add in now. There is also a provision in the law that allows companies to not bother including accessibility in their products if the cost of building in the accessibility is more than 5% of the total cost to build the whole product in the US.

That seems reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Except here’s the thing—the accessibility should have been a part of the original plans to begin with and designed in from the very beginning and should have been considered a necessary element and just another ordinary part of the cost of producing the product, not some extra feature that can be opted out of if it’s too expensive. The problem is that these companies do not understand the fact that if you cannot afford to build the product with the accessibility included, then you cannot afford to build the product and that is that. It’s exactly the same as not being able to afford to make the product with all elements up to safety and health codes and standards. If you can’t afford to meet the legal standards, then you can’t afford to make the product, and it’s that simple. Accessibility is not an exception to this and it should not be considered as such. It should be just as much an ordinary required part of the design process as any other element, not an extra, shiny, fancy feature that you can just choose not to bother with if it costs a little bit of money.

Accessibility should be part of the standard design process just as much as safety codes and health standards and other legal regulations. The ADA has existed for 20 years so companies have had ample time to catch up and learn to plan for accessibility from the beginning as a part of the standard required design process. If you can’t afford to create the product fully up to code, standards, and accessibility laws, then you simply can’t afford to make the product. No excuses, no exceptions.

Thanks for this awesomely informative post; this is precisely what I used to do for a living, in a college environment. People were often surprised that this work was not somehow already done by the publishing companies, but nope. My department did it all by hand, more or less. From scanning, to creating PDFs, to OCR text extraction, to formatting the files for JAWS, to making the corrections and image descriptions.

The thing is, college textbooks are so image heavy, compartmentalized, and splashed with text boxes on every page, with increasingly convoluted diagrams that sometimes take up multiple pages, I was basically *writing* half the textbook myself. Basically, you have to take an image like this diagram (which might be in a book, or part of a handout, or be embedded in an inaccessible online module, or part of a video lecture, or maybe it’s part of a powerpoint or slideshow):

and figure out how to describe every bit of pertinent information that is happening visually, decide in what order to present that information, and do it in a way that doesn’t make the student just decide to give up because holy crap, right??

And this part is *just* the textbook. I did this for all class materials-in all topics, in all formats, for every teacher, in every discipline. everything from astronomy, world history, american history, economics, biology, literature, art history, history of modern philosophy, poetry, and even a few things for extracurricular and clubs.

And you know what? A lot of the time professors would seem to think they’re doing everyone some kind of favor by giving us the books and materials like, the DAY before class starts. Or, y’know, sometimes like a week AFTER.

There’s a reason I decided to become staff in Disability Services rather than a professor as I’d originally intended-I was a disabled student too, and I wanted to do my best to prevent others from having to fight like I had to fight. I started out with like 5 people working under me to get the stuff scanned and processed and I was doing the final corrections, formatting, and image/diagram descriptions; by the time it was nearing its end it was just me literally flopping books on a scanner with one hand and typing with my fingers and wrist with the other.

They eliminated my department like 2 years ago, and I got laid off. **there’s** your “commitment” to accessibility in higher education.

That’s how the sausage gets made, my friends….and in this case, how it doesn’t.

Indie author weighing in:

I’ve looked into doing audiobooks for my novels and… the one company NOT affiliated with Amazon and its predatory copyright-stealing antics costs the author $240US per hour.

In advance.

I’m betting “forget braille” is my only option in regards to making my writing accessible to the blind.

This _should_ be a free service for publication of any variety, but…

1. Braille is expensive
   
2. So are actors to read things
3. Studio time is valuable, darling
4. There’s currently no such thing as an easy way to print braille books

And unless there’s a blindness epidemic sweeping the globe, accessibility is not going to be a priority because other people have made it ludicrously expensive. I mean, I want to have my stuff out there for everyone? But I can’t afford to do it.

So yes, audio production is really difficult and complicated. But braille doesn’t actually have to be. If you’re going for printed braille paper, sure, but there’s a much easier way. It’s been mentioned a bunch of times in different parts of this thread, but the key piece for making something accessible in braille is a stripped-down, plain text file. This is difficult to do from the finished product, but if you start from the word document, it’s just a matter of making a few structural changes in mark ups to create a working plane text file that is braille compatible. This would mean that blind readers with refreshable braille displays could just purchase the plane text file and read it on their own display. There isn’t a freeway that I know of to get a plain text file like this sent to a braille embosser and made into an actual paper braille book unless it’s necessary for school or work or something else that vocational rehabilitation agencies may be able to pay for, but if more publishers were dedicated to creating plain text Braille compatible files, the blindness community could certainly work with them to maybe develop something that could bridge that gap for readers who either don’t have access to refreshable braille displays or would rather have the paper copy for whatever reason. Perhaps we could create some sort of company or nonprofit organization or department or what have you that would work with blind people who purchased plaintext braille files that they would like to have embossed into paper copies. So I realize your tone is coming from the fact that you don’t know much about how the whole thing works, but never assume it can’t be done.

Again, audio is far more complicated and I am not the expert to consult on it, but braille is more doable than you think.

Please please please make this go viral. Everywhere