On the bad days, it feels like nothing is accessible to me, but even on those days, there's one thing I know I can do: read.
Privileged with the skill of Braille and the posession of assistive tech, reading is as easy for me as breathing, and I have always loved it. A chance to escape somewhere, learn something new, examine an old problem from a new angle—the possibilities are endless. And all of it far more accessible to me than most other things in my life.
Except when it comes to the Bible.
Well, not really the Bible. My Bible, specifically.
The edition of the Bible I have chosen as my own, the one I read from cover to cover, ponder as a holy text, and study as a scholar, is the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha, downloaded from my favorite accessible books site. For those who don't speak Bible-nerd, that means that my Bible is longer than most Protestant bibles, because it contains an additional section including several books accepted as scripture by some traditions but not others. It also means that every chapter of this colossal Bible is annotated with notes on translation, history, and possible interpretations, which add another couple hundred pages or so.
In other words, this thing is huge. That's not the inaccessible part, although I'll admit it's not great. My notetaker doesn't like to open huge files, but it's easy enough to split my Bible into smaller ones.
No, the problem is that the formatting of my Bible is shit.
Imagine, if you will, that you're reading a book like the Bible that has several books, each containing an introduction and many chapters divided into verses, and lots and lots of footnotes.
Now imagine that someone has messed with the line breaks. It's not always clear where a paragraph ends, where a chapter ends, where introduction becomes scripture or scripture becomes notes. Sometimes the lines flow together; sometimes the line breaks divide sentences
in half, or separate them from their punctuation
. Now imagine the spacing is wonky too. Lots of extra spaces everywhere, random words offset by several spaces for no reason. Now imagine that this book has been scanned, and the scanner has made some funky mistakes, like periodically turning God into Cod, mixing up vv. 1-11 for w. I-n, and so forth. Now imagine that almost everythingin the bloodyannotationsis italicized and this might be a feature of the original book but you don't care because it looks stupid.
Any of these things, on their own, would be annoying. Altogether, they make the book almost unreadable.
At this point, it might be fair to ask, why not give up on this Bible and go find a new one? There are absolutely other digital editions—hell, better hardcopy Braille editions, if you have a bookcase to spare. And I'll admit, there's some wisdom to this question.
But the thing is, I love my stupid inaccessible Bible. I love it the way I love so many other inaccessible things in my life, like traveling, or buying clothes, or playing computer games. I live in a world that was not made for me, and I love it anyway. I love it, and strive to make it more accessible.
And the thing about this Bible—the thing about this ridiculous I-don't-even-know-how-someone-screwed-it-up-this-badly Bible—is: it's fixable. It's fixable by me. I, on my own, can make my own accessible Bible. The number of accessibility issues that are 100% fixable for me byme might be exactly one.
So off and on for the past three or so years, I have been engaged in reading and "editing" my Bible. Deleting the extra spaces, fixing the line spacing, clearly marking chapters and note sections, adding in markers I can use a search command to find again—basically turning this stinking pile of poo into the most accessible thing I've ever seen, and at the same time reading the whole damn Bible.
It's a challenge, of course. Reading the Bible on its own isn't easy, and the editing work gets mindnumbing to say the least. But the accomplishment I feel when I finish editing a book, knowing that the next time I need to look up a verse I'll be able to find it and its notes with ease—that's worth it.
I believe everything should be as accessible as possible, but I have some particular feelings about the Bible. The Bible is one of the foundations of Christianity, and everyone should be able to access it if they choose. My Bible will, eventually, be fully accessible to me. I may have chosen the harder path to get there, but I will
get there.
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