by Fernando Torrente

Words on paper and digital words: for the freedom of access to the written words.

Reading is a right that each one of us exercises how and when it is convenient, but unfortunately not everyone can. People who live with a vision loss are still today facing significant obstacles to exercising this right fully because of the difficulty or impossibility to access the written words due to visual limitations. Such limitations have been for centuries an unsuperable barrier which has influenced significantly the cultural and intellectual growth of blind persons, obligated to turn to all means possible in order to experience the freedom to read: friends and acquaintances, volunteers, cassette tapes, etc. until one day computer technologies exploded.
Words on paper, in fact, are today always, or nearly always, children of digital words, generated by a printing process which originates from a file, readable and usable on an ordinary computer. Thanks to that file, blind people can finally eliminate obstacles to the access of independent reading, since digital content can be read with a voice synthesizer or a braille display.
However, there is still an obstacle compromising the freedom to read for these people, since these books, generally still distributed on paper, do not come with the their original files, remaining instead in the zealous care of publishers who keep them in archives, afraid of acts of piracy and looting, and susceptible to jeopardize legitimate commercial interests and the sacrosanct copyrights.
So, visually impaired persons, alone or in associations, in order not to renounce the pleasure of reading, armed with a scanner and hours and hours of tiring and patient work, build, page by page, the digital document from which the hard copy was taken. It is almost like recreating a pear from the juice of the fruit, instead of picking it right from the tree.
People who are blind are not expecting tributes or generous privileges, they are not asking for the gratuitousness of a service or donations; anything but. They are asking the publishers the right to have the digital file to be read on one's own computer for each paper book purchased. To those publishers, they are asking a creative commitment to define and implement a distribution procedure, putting together the file and the book, this way safeguarding their own natural right to reading, and preserving the interests of all those involved.
These few lines taken from the appeal prepared by Bologna's Istituto Francesco Cavazza and the Association of Bolognese Authors summarize with precision the condition of those who are blind in regards to the possibility of accessing the written words and what the demands are in order to remove the remaining obstacles.
To explain these requirements and to create awareness for the specialists in the field and the public, the Istituto Cavazza has contacted the Association of Bolognese Authors, "who remain the owners of their own stories", to ask them to get involved together in order to make progress in resolving this issue. The Association's response, whose president is Carlo Lucarelli, was immediate and without hesitation. The literary and information evening of February 28, organized in collaboration at the Institute, represented the first step of a common path to reach, we hope, a solution to the problem. The evening, where the public's participation was very good, was animated with the outloud reading by Stefano Tassinari, Matteo Bortolotti, respectively Vice-President and Secretary of the Association, by Gregorio Scalisi, Massimo Vaggi and Michela Tura. The reading choices were made by the protagonists of the evening among works of authors that are dear to them: Joyce, Rabelais and Soriano, to name just a few, have conveyed to spectators a multitude of emotions that only literature and poetry can do. Between a reading session and the other, issues relating to reading access were discussed from various points of view, the legal aspect in relation to the copyright, the publishers' perspective presented by Antonio Bagnoli of Pendragon, and that of persons living with vision loss who have expressed their needs. At the end of the evening, Batteo Bortolotti read the appeal prepared by the Istituto Cavazza and the Association of Bolognese Authors designed for specialists in the field, intellectuals, and citizens in order to find in due time satisfying solutions which would, in one hand, preserve the rights of authors and publishers, and, on the other hand, provide efficient answers to the legitimate demands of blind people.
It seems right to emphasize how, according to us, the possibility for blind people to gain access to the works in digital format does not represent any danger for those who produce it, given that we do not believe that there is a place for the commercialization of these copies. As a matter of fact, if there were some possibility for this to happen, we think that others would have already understood that a scanner today is actually available to everyone.

To read the appeal and sign it, please go to:
www.cavazza.it (in Italian only)