Today we mark another important achievement for equal rights, this time for over a million Americans — and over 340 million people worldwide — who are blind, visually impaired, or with other print disabilities.
In April, 2012, President Obama expressed the United States’ commitment to a treaty that “ensures that copyright is not a barrier to equal access to information, culture, and education for visually impaired persons and persons with print disabilities.” This week in Morocco, we made good on that commitment, joining with over 150 states in approving a landmark treaty that holds the potential to open up a world of knowledge to a population that is too often shut off from it.
According to the World Blind Union, of the million or so books published in the world each year, less than 5 percent are made available in formats accessible to the visually-impaired. We call this “book famine.” No one has said it better than Stevie Wonder, the world-famous singer-songwriter and prominent advocate for the treaty: we must “end the information deprivation that continues to keep the visually impaired in the dark” — and today, we are proud to mark a major achievement in that effort.
Read more of the White House Blog article HERE.
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