This isn’t actually anything really new, just loathsome and not everyone is aware of it.
Link Slate.com:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/03/dmca_copyright_reform_u_s_law_makes_digital_media_inaccessible.single.html
Making derivatives of physical copies of works specifically for the deaf, blind, and other disabled has an exemption in copyright law, but when these things are in electronic form they often have DRM (Digital Rights Management, which is in my view nothing more than a method of making sure content you purchase is broken and won’t play correctly in your machine of choice, all in the name of “anti-piracy”), which prevents 3rd parties from adding in accessibility additions, such as captions and subtitles, or prevents users from consuming the content on devices that actually work for them.
US law is impacting more than Americans when it prevents making content accessible to those with disabilities. An example Amazon selling e-books who can only be read on Kindles. In fact Amazon is now the last big player of e-book reader makers who hasn’t fixed this now that Barnes&Noble’s Nook has been made accessible to screen reader technology, and it’s lead to some users breaking DRM on books so they can read the book on a device that can use a screen reader. Of course they’re also breaking DRM to prevent Amazon from stealing back books users have bought.