Disability advocate Paul Harpur threatens to sue people a lot. It’s a tactic, he said, that is one of the only ways to force big publishing companies to make printed material accessible.

And making books accessible to people with a print disability — like blindness or dyslexia — is essential to ensuring those students have equal opportunities in education, Harpur said. It’s a problem that Harpur has dealt with first hand as a visually impaired academic.

Harpur, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland and scholar on issues of accessibility, spoke to a group of about 20 people in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons Room at Bird Library on Tuesday. He sought to answer the question: What can universities do to improve accessibility of print publications to people with disabilities?

One option, he said, is to sue. Harpur said he recently threatened to sue a large company that operates an important database for people studying, practicing or teaching law.

“Suing is framed in a way that’s adversarial, but it’s a way of encouraging companies to make the changes where the law encourages them to,” he said. “Maybe because I’m a lawyer I think this way though.”

When Harpur first brought the lawsuit against LexisNexis he was told he didn’t have a case because he was not a customer — the University of Queensland was. He called a few days later and asked if he could become a subscriber. Then he asked if the material on the database was accessible.

“They shut up after that,” he said.

Even when materials are made accessible, they are often not usable, Harpur said. He likes framing the question of accessibility in terms of usability, or how convenient it is to use an accessible material like an e-book.

Harpur points to a common problem he has when using accessible materials, such as law review journals. While the journal is technically accessible, he said he still finds it difficult to cite pages — an important part of studying and teaching law.

When printed texts are made accessible, Harpur said, they often don’t even come with page numbers, which makes simple things like citing or knowing where you stopped reading unnecessarily burdensome.

“Academically, it still sucks,” he said.

It also takes longer for students with a print disability to get accessible materials, especially if a print book needs to be scanned to make it into an accessible e-book, Harpur said. On average, it takes one to three weeks longer for students to get accessible materials, he added.

“It’s a stupid situation,” he said. “The people that need to get books first are the ones getting them last.”

The main things universities can do, he said, is to continue putting pressure on publishers to make things both accessible and usable.

“Imagine what would happen if universities all decided to demand accessibility?” he said.

Harpur acknowledged the difficulties in always fighting for accessibility in an ablest society. But he said people shouldn’t think about people with disabilities as taking things or resources that could be used for other things.

“People with disabilities have a right to education,” he said. “It’s discrimination not to have things accessible.”

Published on February 16, 2016 at 10:30 pm

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu