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Funding and governance of library and information services for visually impaired people: international case studies

Part2:Country studies

Australia

Overall availability of material in alternative formats

Vision Australia has 18,000 analogue titles in its collection.

According to the Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities, only 3% of information is available in accessible format for use by people with vision and other print disabilities.

CAUL believes that:

Most text books recently published in Australia would be available electronically on request direct from publisher through individual licence for students with a print disability. Many text books published overseas are also available on request.

The Blind Citizens’ Australia 2002 survey, cited above, stated:

“The two quasi-national specialist services have a combined total of around 16,000 unique titles, around 2500 new titles being added annually. There are 95,000 audio books and 40,000 Braille books available for borrowing. By comparison, local government libraries in Australia have 36 million books and other materials available as lending stock, and the state and national libraries hold a further 15 million books and other materials as non-lending stock.

“The public libraries’ collections include both large print and audio titles, but these are a fraction of the size of the standard print collections, often quite old, and far more limited in diversity. Many of the audio books held in public libraries are in abridged forms, and often in poor condition. With the exception of the Canberra Library, public libraries in Australia do not hold Braille collections (although Braille is the preferred literacy medium of many blind people).”

Clearly, while some numbers will have changed, the overall relationship between material available to sighted and visuallyimpaired people is not likely to have changed substantially.