Today I finished EFA's submission (PDF) to the Department of Broadband, Communication and Digital Economy’s Future Directions review.

The submission tackles a number of important issues for the digital economy, including open access to public sector information, electronic accessibility of printed material to people with a print disability, broad-based ICT training, and copyright policy.

We conclude the submission with a reminder that our policy framework ought to empower Australians to access and build upon information in the digital economy:

As Australia transforms into a knowledge based economy, the policies we choose to adopt for the creation and dissemination of information become crucially important. It is becoming increasingly clear that greater access to information and greater technical and legal abilities to remix, build upon and improve that information are fundamental drivers of innovation. EFA believes that the single most important issue in an innovation policy is ensuring that Australians are empowered to innovate, and that the barriers we impose to innovation are justified with reference to our social goals.

I would like to express my thanks to all those who helped to write the submission. As far as I know, this was the first open collaborative submission produced by EFA. A number of people were involved in contributing to its development on our public wiki, which helped me immensely. I'm very grateful to the mostly anonymous editors. This process gives me high hopes for the future development of EFA as an inclusive volunteer based organisation.

In Australia, blind people are able to access texts in braille and books on
tape, but the demand for these media is decreasing. Blind people today are
increasingly reliant on texts in electronic form, and these are much less
readily available in Australia. Electronic texts are more portable and less
cumbersome than large braille volumes, and are much faster to navigate
than audio recordings. However, in Australia it is difficult for blind people to
get access to a wide range of electronic texts and there exists no scheme
enabling such access. At the same time sighted people are using electronic
text and other digital media at an ever-increasing rate. In order to
approximate the same level of access as sighted people, blind people
require access to accessible electronic versions of all published material.
The authors suggest that given the legal imperatives of Australia’s domestic
legislation, treaty obligations and social values, that there exists a moral
imperative to create a scheme providing blind people with access to digital
print media.

Thanks to the MALR and LexisNexis, it's available here under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 (AU) licence. Attribution must be to the authors and the publisher (first published by LexisNexis and MALR).

Published as Nicolas Suzor, Paul Harpur and Dilan Thampapillai, 'Digital copyright and disability discrimination: From braille books to bookshare' (2008) 13(1) MALR 1.