Seeing - without sight

Two major moves to help the visually impaired survive in today's technological world are under way in Bradford.

Technology users take for granted the vast amounts of information available via a computer screen. The latest paperback novel or current research can be checked at the click of a button.

However, copyright which owners were often prepared to be sympathetic about when it was a matter of transcribing hard copy versions into Braille, is more of a problem with online access. Allowing material to be used in a large-type format electronically, or in other forms which make it accessible for the visually handicapped, can leave the owner open to a wide-ranging loss of copyright income from others with normal sight.

But some innovative thinking by Dr Tom Wesley of the Management Centre and colleagues is producing a system which permits access to 'licensed' users only.

Dr Wesley co-ordinates the SEDODEL project - Secure Document Delivery for Blind and Partially Sighted People - in which his partners are the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), the British Library Copyright Office, the Open University, French technology company EURITIS, the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and the French research organisation INSERM. It is working out ways in which the intellectual copyright of authors can be safeguarded, while at the same time the visually impaired can enjoy online access to the vast riches to be explored on the World Wide Web.

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University - Public Relations - Annual Reports - 2000 Contents - Research

University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Content last updated 19 May 2000
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