A Mueller Report for the Visually-Impaired

Available editions of the Mueller Report failed the accessibility test for the visually-impaired. So Thad McIlroy and Bill Kasdorf went to work making a fully accessible, freely available edition

Hundreds of pages of carefully worded legalese, including footnotes and citations. Large portions even blacked out. Not the usual summer reading, yet the book is a big hit with readers. The made-for-TV version – of a sort – arrived on screens this week.

Officially titled, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, and better known as The Mueller Report, the unlikely sounding bestseller is available for free as a download from the U.S. Department of Justice. However, multiple editions – including from Scribner, Melville House and Skyhorse – have sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices starting at $9.99.

One group of readers, though, couldn’t learn for themselves what Robert Mueller and his investigative team had uncovered. Available editions of the report failed the accessibility test for the visually-impaired. So, publishing consultants Thad McIlroy and Bill Kasdorf set to work making a fully accessible, freely available edition a reality  from the Digital Public Library of America.

“It’s a basic right,” McIlroy says. “It shouldn’t be that we need to create, after the fact, an accessible digital version for this community as if they were somehow a lesser community of readers.

“It seems essential that [“born-accessible e-books] should just be part of the publishing process,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Why should the sight-impaired have to wait six months for an accessible version?”