moss.geek.nz

So, there’s alot of talk flying around the Kiwi blogs at the moment about Internet censorship. It’s mostly centered with Thomas Beagle and a few others. And I intend to weigh in on it in a timely fashion – probably in the next two weeks with something well documented and essay length.

The point of this post however, is to raise a small irony I found in attempting to broach another online subject with our dear Government. About two months ago, BoingBoing and Cory Doctorow, a well known internet and freedom thereof advocate, was posting about a WIPO treaty on copyright that affected disabled people the world over.

He asked for people to contact their governments on their stance, and simply question it to them. I did so.

I chose to email the Disability Commissioner. Two months later, I got my response. It is a PDF file attached to an email. It contains barely a paragraph, which says a lot of nothing while name dropping that several government departments are involved in such an issue – “Thanks for your question. I’ve wrapped it in red tape!”

Email to Hon Tariana Turia – here it is.

The irony is, for asking on how we stand on accessibility of information for people with disabilities, primarily the blind and the production of spoken text for them, the reply came in a format that is thoroughly incompatible with most screen readers. The funny part is, PDFs can be easily made compatible with screen readers – they can store the plain text inside that file format. But instead, it’s a scanned page – a binary blob with no accessibility to the actual words.

I emailed them back pointing this out – I hope my reply 2 months from now will be as enjoyable as this one.

Follow-Up: Got it back in plain text within a week. Still in an attached .doc file, but plain text enough for a screen reader. Actually, it’s fun because it has metadata. The total edit time of the Word document was 5 minutes.