Nominations close on Monday September 16th for the WIPO Accessible Books Consortium International Excellence Awards 2024. As in previous years, there are two categories for the awards, allowing both publishers and other initiatives to be celebrated for their work progressing accessibility in their respective fields.

The winners will be announced during a ceremony in December at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico.

Further details can be found on the ABC Awards Announcement page.

DAISY initiatives and technology positively impact the lives of people around the world on a daily basis, and we're always happy to hear and share your stories of this taking place. We recently published the story of students at Cairo University who used DAISY Online Learning and DAISY tools to enable a fellow student to receive accessible books, and starting a wider accessibility awareness effort.

Artificial Intelligence is a rapidly developing technology with the promise to improve many aspects of our lives. This potential also extends to many areas of accessible information, with developments related to content creation but also service delivery.
At DAISY we closely follow the latest developments in AI, working with companies to test and provide feedback on some of those initiatives, but to help inform our work we’d like to hear about AI use and interests from library services around the world.
We're asking all library services to please complete our AI Survey.

The DAISY webinar series counting down to the implementation of the European Accessibility Act continues to share valuable information with the publishing community with a year-long schedule of sessions. Full recordings, summary notes, transcripts and related links for the first three webinars are available on the DAISY website:

• August 28, 2024 “Accessibility Testing (content and websites) – T-304 Days”
• July 24, 2024 “Technical approaches to upgrading the backlist – T-339 Days”
• June 26, 2024 “Countdown to EAA – T-367 Days”

The next three webinars in the series are:

• September 25, 2024 “Image Descriptions – T-269 Days”
• October 23, 2024 “Reading Solutions – T-241 Days”
• November 27, 2024 “Accessibility In Practice – T-206 Days”

Information about the webinars and the full list of previous sessions is available on the DAISY webinars page.

In addition to our free online learning resources, DAISY also offer trainer-led instruction, with scheduled sessions on accessible formats, offering discounts for specific participants including DAISY Members:

Confidently Create Accessible PowerPoint Presentations
With groups starting October 1st and November 5th, this short course will guide the creation and testing of Microsoft PowerPoint presentation slides including using multimedia content.

Confidently Create Accessible Documents
On November 5th and December 3rd our course on the creation of accessible Word documents returns by popular demand, covering the origination, testing and conversion to other accessible formats.

We are looking for people to contribute to a webinar we have planned later this year. Specifically, we’re interested in talking to people with print disabilities who are willing to talk about their experience of reading ebooks, enabling the publishing community to understand the impact of accessibility in practice. All contributions will be captured from short video calls, enabling people to contribute from work or home. If this is something you or someone you know can help with, please contact us at webinars@daisy.org with a few details about yourself including where you are and how you read, we’ll then be in touch with further information.