Agreement opens 14M books to the blind

More than 14 million digitized books will soon be available to blind and low-vision users, thanks to a new collaboration involving the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and HathiTrust, a consortium of research libraries headquartered at the University of Michigan.

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust maintains an online archive of millions of digitized titles in different languages from libraries around the world. “Supporting print-disabled users has been a focus of HathiTrust since the very beginning, and we have long provided students at member schools with access to our collection,” said Mike Furlough, executive director of the consortium. “The collaboration with NFB is an important turning point, because we are now striving to help non-academic users for the first time.”

When launched, this program will dramatically increase the availability of books for individuals with vision challenges. According to the NFB, less than 5 percent of all published works meet their constituents’ needs.

“Supporting print-disabled users has been a focus of HathiTrust since the very beginning, and we have long provided students at member schools with access to our collection.”

– Mike Furlough, executive director of the HathiTrust consortium