Re: DRM and the European Accessibility Act

I want to add an emphasis to one of Tzvia’s sentences:  “DRM __CAN__ get in the way of accessibility.”

I just want to caution that we do not make the assumption that a vendors DRM will always get in the way of accessibility, and thus DRM is by default ‘bad’.  Bad DRM is bad code, like other (non accessible) code.  A vendor (and, in reality the whole supply chain from authoring thru to end user reading) should (and can) support accessibility, and we should make sure there is transparency about each link in that chain.  DRM is a feature that content owners require for distribution in specific markets, and a well implemented DRM will not ‘get in the way’.


Rick Johnson | Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Strategy and Accessibility
VitalSource Technologies, LLC
get.vitalsource.com <https://get.vitalsource.com/>



From: Siegman, Tzviya <tsiegman@wiley.com>
Date: Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 7:34 AM
To: cristina.mussinelli@fondazionelia.org <cristina.mussinelli@fondazionelia.org>
Cc: public-publishingbg@w3.org <public-publishingbg@w3.org>, public-epub-wg@w3.org <public-epub-wg@w3.org>
Subject: [External] FW: DRM and the European Accessibility Act
Hi Cristina, We are exploring this question at Wiley, and I think this affects all of us. The European Accessibility Act (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882<https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882>) says in Section IV f about DRM and Accessibility: The provision of services in order t                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

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Hi Cristina,

We are exploring this question at Wiley, and I think this affects all of us. The European Accessibility Act (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882<https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882>) says in Section IV f about DRM and Accessibility:

The provision of services in order to maximise their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities, shall be achieved by including functions, practices, policies and procedures and alterations in the operation of the service targeted to address the needs of persons with disabilities and ensure interoperability with assistive technologies:
Ebooks:
(f) ensuring that digital rights management measures do not block accessibility features.

Most of us distribute our ebooks with DRM. The ebook files we sell direct to consumer have DRM, and the files we sell via 3rd party retailers have DRM applied by retailers. DRM can get in the way of accessibility. Do we need to change our DRM practices? Do we need to remove the hooks for DRM in EPUB spec?

Thanks,
Tzviya

Tzviya Siegman
Information Standards Principal
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>