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

Part I: Summary Report

Background

The proportion of people who have difficulty reading conventional print, whether because of actual vision loss or because of various cognitive problems, is substantial, and because of the ageing profile of populations in most developed countries, acquired vision loss is increasing. The question of how to make reading matter accessible to all is therefore becoming ever more important.

Each country's provision of library and information services for visually impaired people has emerged from complex historical, geographical, cultural, political and social developments to which we cannot properly do justice here. Some of these factors will be discussed in the contextual section which follows the discussion of the models themselves. They range from the general organisation of government . centralised, federal etc. . to social attitudes to disability.

There are however, some important commonalities. Every country has to provide educational as well as 'leisure' reading materials in accessible formats, and very often this provision is a matter of divided responsibilities, both between education and general provision, and within education between school and tertiary education. Often there are serious gaps and grey areas in provision, for example, who provides for adult education?

Technology too is a common factor, though clearly countries are at very different levels in terms of for example, the penetration of ownership of personal computers with Internet access and the extent of broadband availability.

The process of producing alternative format materials is also largely a common one, though individual countries may have particular issues to deal with arising from e.g. multiple mother tongues or complexities related to a particular language e.g. the conversion of the Korean language into Braille. Educational material, along with music, is some of the most challenging to convert, as it includes diagrams, references, footnotes, tables and so on which all pose problems. Avoiding duplication of production, within and across borders (where languages are shared or widely spoken), is a key goal of producing organisations.