Not yet the final Chapter: The History of Library Services for Canadians Who are Blind, Deafblind and Partially Sighted

"The story on accessible books and libraries is still being written. In this third chapter in this series, the Triple Vision team speaks with George Kerscher, Chief Innovation Officer of the DAISY Consortium and senior officer of global literacy with the Benetech corporation of Bookshare, and Kieran LeBlanc, Executive Director of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. Involved in accessible book publishing since 1988, George Kerscher talks about the kinds of standards which exist to assist publishers in producing accessible books without having to go through a third party. “You want to get to the place where you’re getting materials from the commercial outlets and not necessarily have to go through a service like NNELS or CNIB or CELA. All of these are great services, but my vision of the world is where they’d be born accessible right out of the box and we wouldn’t have to go through a service,” her says. But Kieran Leblanc is clear that the Canadian publishing industry still needs a fair bit of support to produce their works ""born accessible."" ""I would say publishers are doing accessible publishing because it is the right thing to do. They would not be seeing any kind of any monetization or profit from that at this point. But there is a value that they want their books to be available to all readers in formats that readers need to access,” he says. At the end of these three episodes, the Triple Vision team still has questions about this evolving industry, so stay tuned for more podcasts in this area in the future!"