It is well known that blind and partially sighted people have greatly restricted access to information compared with the general population. The improvement of this situation is an ongoing challenge both to individuals and to organisations of and for the blind and partially sighted. Engelen et al. The issues discussed by Engelen et al. These transformations can be made at a fraction of the cost of transcription from the printed word.
Sighted people obtain much information by rapid visual scanning of the visible structure of a page.
Blind and partially sighted people have little or no ability to scan visually, so such structural features must be present explicitly in the electronic document. The most significant form of structuring electronic texts is by using SGML - the Standard Generalized Markup Language. The developing infrastructures of the Information Society, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web are of immense significance to blind and partially sighted people. The same properties of electronic documents which are so valuable for the blind and partially sighted also underlie one of the biggest hurdles, that of the copyright problem. Publishers are reluctant to provide electronic copies of their texts to organisations of and for the blind or to individual users because of legitimate fears about losing control of their intellectual property rights.