This year’s winners of the Accessible Books Consortium’s (ABC) International Excellence Award will be announced on October 30 at the 2023 Sharjah Publishers Conference, the first time that this prestigious award has been presented in the Middle East. “We hope this will encourage publishers in the region to further their efforts in making their e-books accessible to people who are blind or otherwise print disabled.”, said Mansour Al Hassani, Director of Publisher Services Director of Publisher Services at SBA and Director of Sharjah Publishing City.
“We are delighted that we have received nominations from publishers and organizations located in 20 countries on five continents, the widest geographical spread of nominees since we started presenting the ABC International Excellence Award in 2015”, stated Monica Halil Lövblad, Head, ABC from WIPO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. “The panel of experts was very impressed with the calibre of the nominees and had difficulty selecting the short-list.”
Finalists in the publisher category this year are Gerbera Ediciones (Argentine), Accessible Publishers Ltd. (Nigeria) and Bokforlaget Hegas AB (Sweden). In the initiative category, the short-listed nominees are Ms. Julie Ganner and Ms. Agata Mrva-Montoya (Australia), Accessible Reading Materials Library, Chetana Charitable Trust (India), Kalimat Foundation (U.A.E.) and Oysters & Pearls (Uganda).
ABC award nominees are judged on the criteria of outstanding leadership and achievements in improving the accessibility of e-books or other digital publications for persons who are blind, have low vision, are dyslexic or have mobility impairments that impact their ability to read the printed word. The finalists are selected by an expert jury composed of representatives of publishers, standards bodies and organizations representing people who are visually impaired, as well as accessibility experts.
The winners of this annual award will be announced during a ceremony on the evening of Monday, October 30 at 17:30. The ABC International Excellence Award was previously presented at the London Book Fair between 2015 and 2020, at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2021, and at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2022.
In 2022, the winners were Kogan Page of the United Kingdom and Ashoka Bandula Weerawardhana of Sri Lanka, in the publisher and initiative categories respectively. Previous winners in the publisher category include Taylor & Francis Group (2021), Macmillan Learning (2020), EDITORIAL 5 (2019), Hachette Livre (2018), SAGE Publishing (2017), Elsevier (2016) and Cambridge University Press (2015). Previous winners in the initiative category include the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) - Canada (2021), LIA Foundation - Italy (2020), ekitabu - Kenya (2019), Daisy Forum of India (2018), Tiflonexos - Argentina (2017), Action on Disability Rights and Development – Nepal (2016) and Young Power in Social Action – Bangladesh (2015).
ABC is a public-private partnership led by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It includes the International Publishers Association, the International Authors Forum, the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations, as well as organizations that represent people with print disabilities such as the World Blind Union (WBU), libraries for the blind and standards bodies.
ABC’s goal is to increase the number of books worldwide in accessible formats, such as braille, audio, e-text or large print, and to make them available to people who are blind, have low vision or are otherwise print disabled. According to a 2017 study published in The Lancet, world-wide there are approximately 253 million people who are blind or visually impaired, nearly 90% of them resident in developing countries where the World Blind Union (WBU) estimates that people who are blind have only a one in ten chance of going to school or getting a job. A lack of accessible books remains a very real barrier to getting an education and leading an independent, productive life.
