Best Practices
Brazil
Brazilian copyright law permits Braille and other accessible formats for visually impaired people to be made so long as the activity is non-commercial. The Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind (FDNC) is a charity which acts under the exception to copyright to produce works in particular formats. It is probably Latin America's largest producer of Braille books and is the largest Brazilian producer of DAISY and audio-books. As well as supplying books to visually impaired people in Brazil, the Foundation produces an audio-magazine which is sent to Portuguese-speaking visually impaired people in Portugal, the United States of America and France.
Accessible copies are distributed by the Foundation in Brazil either directly to visually impaired people known to the Foundation, or indirectly through other organizations. For accessible copies in an electronic format, distribution is carefully controlled with the recipients. The digital books production system used by FDNC offers publishers a full report of the books delivered with each book full users list.
The work of the Foundation has for many years been facilitated by agreements that have been reached with publishers. Under these agreements, publishers have been supplying the Foundation with electronic files of books so that the Foundation can use these as the starting point for making accessible copies rather than a printed text which would need to be scanned. Whereas scanning is reasonably easy for leisure reading material, educational material which includes diagrams, tables and so on is much more difficult to scan satisfactorily.
In the last three years, the Foundation has developed an online (Web) platform to manage all issues involved in the DAISY production work. This platform, called Dorina DAISY Platform (DDP), can receive and store files from the publishers allowing them to access reports and logs of all actions taken by editors and identify all users to whom the books are delivered, in real time. DDP is now in use by a recently created Brazilian DAISY production network and is the basis of the DAISYLATINO production network. It manages each Institution’s work and users independently and uses dedicated hosting in a secure environment. Its book request management module can track each client requests and delivery status. This kind of solution is building a trusted network between publishers and Institutions.
