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

Part I: Summary Report

Relationship of services to visually impaired and print impaired people

Clearly, this partly depends on the issue of copyright exceptions, discussed above. In the European countries under consideration here that have implemented the Information Society directive so as to include perceptual disabilities in the copyright exception, namely Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, plus Canada which has a similar law, library services make little or no distinction in theory, though of course some formats such as Braille are not relevant to those with perceptual disabilities. In practice, funding for serving those with perceptual disabilities has not yet been clarified in the Netherlands and in Canada there is no universal funding for DAISY players for print-impaired people without vision loss. Some respondents also pointed out that library staff may have less training and awareness in dealing with people who are printimpaired but do not have vision loss.

In Japan there is very little awareness of perceptual disabilities and the community is hardly served. In the UK, some organisations such as Calibre and NLB are permitted by their constitutions to serve print-impaired people, but some charities are limited to serving visually-impaired people. Even where organisations are able to do so, copyright throws up barriers.

In Australia, by contrast, even though the copyright position is less clear than in the first group of countries, services are more inclusive. In the USA, RFB&D serves both groups, and if people meet the eligibility criteria they will also be served by NLS. The experience of RFB&D suggests that if an organisation does serve dyslexic people as well as those with vision loss, the economics of the service are shifted, and this results in better uptake for visually impaired people as well.

There is also a view that serving those with learning disabilities is mainly an issue for the education system.