Welcome to the UNICEF Global Portal on Accessible Digital Textbooks for All

UNICEF and its partners are driving an innovative solution called Accessible Digital Textbooks for All, to make textbooks available, affordable and accessible for children with disabilities in all contexts. We cherish the printed word, but it isn’t always accessible to everyone. Children with disabilities remain one of the most marginalized and excluded groups and, for them, gaining access to quality education can often be challenging. By adding specific features to digital formats and following Universal Design for Learning principles, textbooks can be made accessible to students who are blind or have low vision, to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and to those who have intellectual, developmental or learning disabilities, among others. And it doesn’t stop there: these features can enrich the learning experience for all children.

The initiative brings writers, publishers, teachers, organizations of persons with disabilities, technologists and ministry of education representatives together to develop the guidelines needed to produce textbooks in accessible digital formats. They jointly set standards for features like narration, sign language, interactivity and the audio description of images. The Accessible Digital Textbooks for All initiative improves access to education, helping all children to learn and thrive together.

The global portal is designed to promote knowledge sharing and to support the development and implementation of the Accessible Digital Textbooks for All initiative.

The UNICEF Children with Disabilities Programme Division, based at Headquarters in New York, is currently leading this project.

The global portal is designed according to AA accessibility guidelines and includes links to information on the subject on the internet. It offers a starting point for research by providing links to the main resources online.