The Charter contains eight high-level principles relating to the production of digital publications in accessible formats, including the promotion of the adoption of accessibility standards throughout the supply chain, testing digital publications for accessibility and incorporating appropriate feature descriptions and metadata.
Arnaud NOURRY, Hachette Livre Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said:
“For the book industry, making books accessible to the widest readership, including readers who are blind, visually impaired, or print disabled, not only makes economic sense, but is a moral imperative. If we, publishers, do not pioneer this duty on an industrial level, who will ?”
WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said: « We are pleased to see a growing number of key industry players signing the Charter for Accessible Publishing. This advances our global efforts to increase the number of books available for use by people with print disabilities.” He added: “Hachette Livre is a world-leading publisher and its membership will make a big difference in making accessible format books available to blind and visually impaired persons. »
Last year, Hachette Livre won the 2018 ABC International Excellence Award for Accessible Publishing in the publisher category. Hachette Livre was commended by the selection jury for its implementation of “born accessible” production processes in the EPUB3 format in France and for its implementation of mandatory accessibility conformance testing for all of its trade publications through the use of the recently created “Accessibility Checker for EPUB” known as Ace. When its accessibility features are used correctly, EPUB3 is the gold standard in the publishing industry for the production of accessible digital books.
About the Accessible Books Consortium:
The Accessible Books Consortium is a public –private partnership led by WIPO that brings together all of the key players – non-governmental organizations representing people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print-disabled, authors, publishers, collective management organizations, libraries and other authorized entities, as well as standards bodies. ABC was established after the 2013 adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty, which now has 57 contracting parties covering 84 countries, since the European Union ratified the treaty as one bloc. ABC aims to increase the number of books worldwide in accessible formats – such as braille, audio and large print – and to make them available to people who are print disabled.https://www.accessiblebooksconsortium.org/portal/fr/index.html