The challenge of accessibility in the arena of education is formidable. Expansion of inclusive publishing is a way of overcoming it. The current predominant practice of conversion from print and other digital formats is cumbersome. This strong advocacy on behalf of the adoption of the EPUB3 guidelines marked the proceedings of the third annual meeting of the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) in Geneva, on May 16-17.
“Born accessible” books was the crux of the argument by the president of the DAISY Forum of India (DFI), Dipendra Manocha, at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). His audience comprised representatives from authors’ associations, the publishing industry, entities empowered to give effect to copyright exemptions, end-user groups and the Marrakesh Treaty monitoring team at the WIPO. Mr. Manocha’s decades-long hands-on experience with the nitty-gritty of conversion of printed text to Braille, audiobooks, large print and various digitally-accessible formats places him in a unique position among stakeholders.
India has under its belt a robust 2013 global law on copyright limitations and exemptions, besides an equally pioneering amendment to domestic legislation, enacted a year earlier. But going by the speaker’s account, the government and the publishing industry were under obligation to do a great deal more to simplify the process of conversion of print into appropriate alternative formats.
Need for support
Following amendments to India’s copyright law, texts may now be freely transcribed without prior clearances, solely to cater to the interests of targeted groups. Children with vision impairments, of varying degrees of severity, in economically backward regions are beneficiaries, enjoying, at least in theory, unprecedented access to curriculum material. But reaping the range of benefits under the law depends on training and technical support for the conversion of print, and deploying high quality text-to-speech engines. Underscoring the great potential to broadbase the dissemination of information and knowledge are screen-reading software compatible with seven Indian languages, devised among others by the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Correspondingly, the competencies of students to consult relevant literature are contingent upon building the requisite capacity among them to learn the use of dedicated hardware such as daisy players and smartphones. As it turns out, these onerous tasks are the responsibility of an umbrella organisation such as the DFI, constrained by financial capacity, technological know-how and constantly rising demand. An ABC-backed project enables the production of EPUB3-compatible books in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. A most notable 2016 initiative is Sugamya Pustakalaya — a Government of India collaboration with the DFI and Tata Consultancy Services — a repository of digital text formats ready for transcription into Braille.
But, says Mr. Manocha, these advances could transform the accessibility landscape more rapidly provided the original publications were themselves made available in accessible formats. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, besides the National Council of Educational Research and Training, has issued an advisory, urging State governments to mandate textbook boards to produce accessible EPUB3 formats using unicode-based fonts. A formal order from the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development could hasten the process.
