In February 2003, Handicapzéro launched a portal providing free access to national and international news in real time (in partnership with Agence France-Presse), sports news (with the newspaper L’ Équipe), TV programs (with the magazine Télérama), weather (with the service Météo France) and a search engine (with Google), as well as a range of services for health, employment, consumer goods, leisure, sports and telephony.
Blind users can access the site using a Braille device or a speech software. Visually impaired users can set up their own parameters (size and type of fonts, color of background, etc.) to surf the web in an optimal way, by creating and modifying their own visual profile. This profile can be used for any text available on the web, by copying and pasting the text on the web interface. Any user can correspond in Braille with blind users through the website. Handicapzéro provides a free transcription of the letters and prints them in Braille, before sending them by mail for free in Europe.
2 million visitors used the services of the portal in 2006. Handicapzéro intends to demonstrate “that, with the respect of some basic rules, the internet can finally become a space of freedom for all.”
Things are not as simple for an adapted access to books. Patrice Cailleaud, director of communication for Handicapzéro, explained in January 2001 that, if the digital book is “a new complementary solution to the problems experienced by blind and visually impaired users, (…) there are still issues with the copyright legislation and with permissions from authors that prevent us to offer Braille versions or large print versions. The requests for permissions are scarce and long, and seldom work.”
Thus the need for national laws in the wake of an international copyright law for visually impaired users. In the European Union, the directive 2001/29/EC dated May 2001 on “the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society” insists in its article 43 on the need for all member states to adopt measures favoring access to books for the handicapped users that can’t use standard books, especially by promoting accessible formats. Ten years later, there is still a lot to do.
2003 > THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE
[Summary] The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 in California as a non-profit organization whose mission was to give access to the world's scientific and medical literature. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic. All PLoS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited.
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Founded in October 2000, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture in early 2003, to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work.
# PLoS as a catalyst