Accessibility

Accessible Texts

“The Bias of Communication” by Harold A. Innis | Accessible etext & audio stream

Harold A. Innis presented “The Bias of Communication” as a talk at the University of Michigan on April 18, 1949. The essay was gathered in a 1951 collection of his works also titled The Bias of Communication, published by the University of Toronto Press. The copyright is held by the University of Toronto, all rights reserved. The essay is reproduced here under a claim of fair use in a digital format accessible to persons with print disabilities. Innis’ essay is the triggering text for the Media in Transition 6 (MiT6) conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Constructing an accessible text of the essay and documenting its fair use is a goal of Mark Willis’s MiT6 presentation, Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab.

The Public Domain by James Boyle | Indexed PDF

James Boyle believes in the public domain enough to give away his new book there. You can acquire The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind in the conventional way, buying it from a book store. And you can download it as an indexed PDF (1.68 MB). The PDF extends the book’s fungible possibilities, including immediate accessibility to blind readers. When I downloaded the complete text, I needed to finesse opening it in Firefox and reading it with the ZoomText application reader. So I deconstructed the original file into individual chapters, which should provide a more stable format for screen readers. The PDFs are indexed using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0’s OCR function. Please let me know how well other screen readers access the texts. The Public Domain is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. I applaud James Boyle’s example of releasing this book in the public domain. I bought a print copy, and I encourage you to do the same.