Accessible Books Consortium

We'd like to thank a number of organizations, um, who have partnered with the campaign.

The Braillists Foundation is one of those, of course, but we also want to thank the International Council on English Braille, ICEB; the DAISY Consortium; the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is the, uh, pa- the, the, the organization for the Accessible Books Consortium; the European Blind Union Braille Working Group; and the Braille Institute of America.

Thank you to all of those organizations for being a partner in the campaign's work.

We also wanna thank the campaign sponsors, who are Dot Incorporated; CBM, which is Christian Blind Mission, and they have a particular role, uh, to bring the campaign into the lesser economically developed countries; and Humanware.

Thank you.

Nicholas Hoekstra is a researcher, uh, and project manager with a special focus on the promotion of inclusive education.

Uh, Nicholas works with the Accessible Books Consortium and has worked on inclusive education projects in 30 countries.

Welcome in, uh, Nick.

So I'm finishing my PhD in special education at the University of Kansas.

And in parallel to that, I also work with an initiative called the Accessible Books Consortium.

It's a project that helps to implement the Marrakesh VIP Treaty, the Marrakesh Treaty for the Visually Impaired, to help gain access to books and other materials in accessible formats.

So I work with the ABC, as we call it, as a program manager, supporting some of our training and technical assistance projects around the world.

But then how does this Braille survey come into your personal picture? How did you get involved with that?

This was a really beautiful blending of my two roles as being both a researcher in special education and in topics related to supporting education as well as my work with the Accessible Books Consortium.

This year, there's a joint campaign that was launched.

It was launched on January 4th, and it's a joint campaign of the World Blind Union and the International Council for the Education of Persons with Visual Impairments, ICEVI.