Our first group of issues relates to publishers. In most states, publishers have no legal responsibility to provide alternative formats to institutions of higher education. Moreover, publishers' infrastructures (that is, their processes, software, equipment, distribution, etc.) have been optimized to produce a final product that is physically printed on paper and distributed to a retail outlet. Any other product format (such as an HTML version of a textbook) must be produced from the print-optimized version. This leads to accessibility barriers.
Problem #1: Publishers have little or no responsibility to provide accessible text materials in the higher education environment.
"Can't the publishers just click a button and produce an accessible format?"
As difficult as it is to imagine, the answer at this point in time is no. Only recently have most publishers seriously examined a change in process to produce digital formats of textbooks that "transform gracefully" into other formats. But to do so is to change their entire paradigm of business. Even so, publishers are moving in the digital direction. As more and more states approve statutes requiring accessible texts, and national pressure mounts to address the issue in a legal manner, publishers are scrambling to get the necessary changes into place.
This illustration is not meant to infer that publishers don't care about accessibility. On the contrary, they see accessibility as a means of not only assisting students with disabilities, but also as a competitive advantage. After all, the same techniques that make information accessible to students with disabilities also make the information accessible to non-disabled students who may access the information using other means. There are some issues to work out, such as national file format (http://www.cast.org/policy/)for electronic textbooks, and digital rights management technologies (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june01/iannella/06iannella.html), but these issues will be resolved.
