Sharjah: The recent approval of an international treaty that will improve the global availability of books for the blind is considered a major victory for readers and publishers around the world.
Approved on June 27, the agreement which has been a decade in the making was reached during the Diplomatic Conference of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Marrakesh, Morocco which was attended by Shaikha Bodour Al Qasimi, Founder and CEO of Sharjah-based Kalimat Publishing House.
“I am pleased with the outcome as this historic agreement means that every blind, visually impaired, and print-disabled person can now get access to the books they need for education, employment, and social inclusion,” said Shaikha Bodour during the conference.
The agreement which was signed by the 186 member states of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, will remove copyright obstacles that have hampered the global availability of textbooks and other published works in accessible formats such as Braille, large print and audio.
The agreement also stated that all approving states must now introduce national copyright exemptions that will allow government agencies and non-profit bodies to convert published works to accessible versions and distribute them globally to visually impaired people.
Organisations for the blind will also be able to freely share their collections of accessibly formatted works across borders. This involvement will also extend to developing nations which according to the World Health Organisation account for 90 per cent of the world’s visually impaired people.
Supporting the goal of the treaty to increase the access of the visually impaired to printed materials, Shaikha Bodour shared her concerns about the impact of the treaty on publishers as a number of issues are still being negotiated. “At the moment we have to take comfort in the fact that the treaty assures authors and publishers that the system will not expose their published works to misuse or distribution to anyone other than the intended beneficiaries, and we call on people to continue to support publishers’ efforts in making books accessible and commercially available,” she added.
