Re: reasonable accomodation? (was Re: single browser intranets)

At 06:13 PM 10/26/1999 -0500, David Poehlman wrote:
>I hate to sound a death knell, but charging the same for a disk as for
>a hard copy is not exactly fair.  after all, with the hcopy, you get
>all that paper and stuff.  with a disk, if you need it for access, all
>you really get is the text and no paper to smell and lick and rub
>etc.  Part of this is toungue in cheek.

What, you mean you don't lick your floppies?  I do, thems some
good lickin'.

I know what you mean here, but I can see why the company does it
this way.  For one thing, because they are not mass producing these
disk copies, it may actually cost them more, in terms of time and
people resources, to create an electronic copy than the mass-produced
paper copies.  Also, if they don't wish to distribute primarily 
via disk, they would want a high price so that you are getting the
same knowledge (access, remember!) for the same price; otherwise,
who would buy the book?
 
>I proppose that a person
>needing an accessible version of a book be required to provide proof
>of purchase of the hcopy and receive the the ecopy for free as
>valuadded to the book which they could not use in the first place or
>be able to directly purchase the ecopy for a lower cost which is what
>has been don in some instances.

If I got the ecopy for free I would just return the dead tree copy
to the store for a refund. :)

How about this, you buy the ecopy, and they send you a big empty book
full of blank pages that you can smell and rub your face against
and lick...that way you are getting the same content (information)
as the visual user AND you are getting the same physical objects as
the visual user, all for the same price!

Obviously I'm tongue-in-cheek here too a bit, but I think that there's
arguments on either side, and all it comes down to is "does the 
consumer (blind or otherwise) think this is a good value?"  I'm happy
from our standpoint that the consumer _can_ make that choice, because
I was afraid the choice would have been made for her already due to
lack of access to an alternate content for the text.

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>
Director, Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center
  <URL:http://aware.hwg.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 1999 19:41:23 UTC