Vision Australia welcomes ground breaking steps towards ensuring equality and timely access to written material for people who are blind or have low vision. We recognise Australia’s support for this treaty, as stated in July this year, and the role that Australia has played in the negotiations in the last six months.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) treaty, which would see a huge increase in reading material available in alternative formats, looks set to be finalised in 2013.
This ground-breaking treaty, which has been sought by the World Blind Union (WBU) through four years of intensive UN negotiations, will remove copyright barriers and open up a new world of reading for people who are blind or print-disabled.
Vision Australia General Manager, Maryanne Diamond, who is also immediate past president of the WBU, says:
“The decision of the WIPO Extraordinary General Assembly today is a very significant milestone on the road to a treaty. It means governments have kept the work on track to agree to a binding and effective treaty in 2013, which, if completed, would allow blind people to access many thousands more books.
“The work is far from over, though. We urge all parties to now negotiate a simple, binding and effective treaty. A good treaty will really help us to end the book famine in which only one to seven percent of books are ever made available to us.”
With some 285 million blind and partially sighted people in the world, this treaty will have enormous benefits in bringing equality of opportunity to those who are print-disabled. Currently, many countries have copyright laws which prevent even those very small numbers of books produced in accessible formats in one country being sent to others in countries speaking the same language.
A diplomatic conference to conclude the WIPO treaty has been convened for June 2013.