Producing and Distributing Accessible ebooks

The 11th European e-Accessibility Forum (June 19th, 2017 in Paris) explored the role digital technologies play in ensuring an inclusive cultural landscape. How can digital access empower people with disabilities and enable them to become full participants in cultural life?

Knowledge and information are a part of culture. People with different needs gain access to knowledge and consume information in different ways. The same publication can be read on a variety of devices. For example, learners may start reading an accessible book at home on a large computer screen. Later, they may continue reading the same book in their car using text-to-speech that reads books out loud on a mobile device or tablet. As long as there are accessible books and accessible reading applications, knowledge gets transferred to everyone.

Jesper Klein, Chief Innovation Officer, Swedish Agency for Accessible Media / Chairman of the Board, DAISY Consortium presented Producing and distributing accessible e-books: The Swedish model.

Since the early 2000s, Jesper has been committed to the long-term vision of making reading accessible to people with disabilities. Jesper was head of Research and Development at the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM) and led Sweden’s efforts to digitize books and newspapers, resulting, among other things, in the launch of the Legimus online library for people with disabilities in Sweden in 2013. To date, Legimus has loaned over a million books and counts 75 thousand active users per year.