Best Practices
Canada
CNIB is a nationwide, registered charity providing community-based support, knowledge and a national voice to ensure Canadians who are blind or partially sighted have the confidence, skills and opportunities to fully participate in life. The CNIB Library offers eligible individuals across Canada access to a fully digital library service which includes Braille, printbraille, DAISY audio books, descriptive video, newspapers and magazines, as well as online services. CNIB is Canada’s largest producer of alternative format materials.
Since 1997, when a new exception was introduced into Canadian copyright law, a non-profit organizations acting for the benefit of persons with a perceptual disability can make a copy or sound recording of a work in a format specially designed to meet the needs of that person without infringing copyright. The CNIB Library acts under the exception to copyright to update analogue accessible formats to digital copies, as well as making accessible copies of works acquired for the first time. Its retroactive activity includes converting 4-track audiocassette tape to the DAISY format or hard copy braille to electronic braille. A second exception in Canadian copyright law relating to maintenance or management in general of a library’s permanent collection is also helpful. This exception1 permits a work to be copied in an alternative format if the original is currently in an obsolete format or the technology required to use the original is unavailable.
In October 2007, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) announced the Initiative for Equitable Library Access (IELA). The mandate of IELA is to create the conditions for sustainable and equitable library access for Canadians with print disabilities. Specifically, LAC was asked to develop and cost a strategy for implementing nation-wide partnerships, activities and services to meet the long-term library and information access needs of Canadians with print disabilities. The IELA consultation process continues with stakeholders across Canada, including individuals with print disabilities, consumer organizations of persons with disabilities, representatives of the library, print publishing and alternative format publishing communities.
Currently, the CNIB Library and sister organizations internationally are working collaboratively on a project to develop a strategy for a virtual global accessible library to allow alternative format producers to share their content in order to reduce unnecessary and costly duplication and provide more accessible content in a trusted environment for those with print disabilities around the world. This project is sponsored jointly by the DAISY Consortium and the IFLA Libraries Serving Persons with Print Disabilities Section.
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1 See Section 30.1(1)(c) of the Copyright Act as amended to 3 March 2006
