USA, Canada, and the EU try to kill treaty that protects access to reading material for the blind.

Please Forward, re-tweet, blog, and generally make noise about this.

USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people's access to written material. (Via Boingboing). Additional links: Huffington Post. Read the actual proposal.

"The main aim of the treaty is to allow the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities..."

U.S. Copyright law has typically allowed for this kind of copying/reuse/accommodation. Why on earth would we NOT want it to be codified on an international scale?

And yet, the United States is OPPOSING this treaty. This is, quite frankly, reprehensible.

It pushes two of my big buttons: my "I'm-a-librarian-information-for-all-button" and my "NOBODY-MESSES-WITH-MY-KID" button.

Let me explain.

I am a librarian. I believe, as part of my personal and professional training and philosophy, that information should be available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, or their need for accommodations to render it usable to particular individuals.

I am also a parent to a child with significant physical disabilities who is cognitively at-age.

(I don't tend to blog about it here--if you're violently interested, you can check out my personal livejournal feed.)

Through my experiences raising Caitlin, I have learned first hand that not every reader has the ability to hold, open, and read a book without assistance or accommodations of some kind.

Caitlin is 6. She can recognize words, and follow them across a page, and read them, but she can't hold the book very well on her own. The words need to be big enough for her to see them despite her visual limitations. Being read to, audio books, and devices that can convert text to speech are a necessary part of Caitlin's intellectual life, both for her success in school and for the nurturing of her imagination. She enjoys books immensely, and they are central to her life (as we would hope they would be, having a mom for a librarian and a dad who's a writer).

Opposition to this treaty closes books for my daughter and other people with disabilities.

Shame on the US delegation. Shame on you.

*goes off to fume*