Blind SA argues that the Copyright Act is unconstitutional because it violates the human rights of blind people. The case will be heard on 21 September.
“The current Copyright Act of 1978 forces people who are blind or visually impaired to secure the permission of the copyright holder to translate or convert the publication into a format that is accessible. But copyright holders often reject these requests or ignore this altogether,”“People who are blind or visually impaired experience a book famine, with less than 0.5% of publications available in accessible formats like braille, audio or ‘daisy’.
With templates available to convert books and work into braille, it can be a painless process. But the Copyright Act allows no exemptions. Converting an average novel of about 300 pages to braille by producing a master copy would take 28 days and cost R24 000. “This results in us not having access to those already existing templates and we then have to reinvent the wheel: reproduce what exists already at great expense of time and money — which many of us cannot afford,” BlindSA says.“Even though I am an empowered blind person, the reading deficit was so big when I was a child that even today, my children have read more books than I have.
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