Canadians with disabilities are sure to have improved access to copyrighted works with the release of Accessible Content: A Guide to the Canadian Copyright Act on Searching for Accessible Formats and Producing and Distributing Alternate Formats by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). Written by Victoria Owen, Alexandra Kohn and Laurie Davidson, and released on September 15, 2025, this comprehensive guide marks a significant milestone in Canada’s pursuit of practical, lawful, and equitable access to copyrighted works for people with perceptual disabilities.
The Accessible Content guide provides a clear and practical explanation of how the Canadian Copyright Act enables the creation and sharing of accessible copies of materials. It demystifies several key provisions that empower practitioners in non-profit organizations, libraries, and educational settings to legally reproduce and distribute copyrighted works in accessible formats. It clarifies how the Copyright Act’s Section 32 Persons with Perceptual Disabilities allows non-profit organizations and individuals with perceptual disabilities to reproduce works in alternate formats under certain conditions. The guide also covers the cross-border provisions introduced through the Marrakesh Treaty, including Section 32.01(1), which allows exporting accessible formats to people with perceptual disabilities in other countries, and Section 32.01(2), which restricts such exports if the accessible format is already reasonably available in the destination country. Lastly, it explains Section 41.16, which permits circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs) when actualizing the aforementioned sections.
More than a legal commentary, the guide functions as a practitioner-oriented tool that uniquely highlights and reflects on current practices of organizations and individuals already enacting these provisions rather than being purely aspirational. Through such examples, checklists, best practices, and together with a plain-language glossary, the guide makes the law actionable for those producing accessible materials and for rightsholders seeking clarity about accessibility obligations.
Crucially, the Accessible Content guide reframes copyright not as a barrier but as an enabler of access. These statutory provisions facilitate equitable access to collections by ensuring that readers with perceptual or print disabilities can meaningfully engage with creative and scholarly works on equal terms. The Accessible Content guide includes a dedicated section outlining Canada’s commitment to the Marrakesh Treaty. Simply put, the Marrakesh Treaty is an international agreement that facilitates the cross-border exchange and broader availability of accessible materials. It emphasizes human rights principles throughout, and Canada became a signatory in 2016. By situating Canadian copyright law within this human-rights-focused framework, the guide reflects a broader shift toward understanding access to knowledge as a right rather than a market-dependent privilege.
Why the Copyright Act matters for accessibility
Canada’s accessibility legal landscape is multilayered. Federally, the Accessible Canada Act, 2019 (ACA) aims to achieve a barrier-free country by 2040 through the creation, operationalization and reporting on accessibility plans within the federal government. Provincially, however, accessibility requirements vary. Many provinces do have dedicated accessibility legislation, such as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) in Ontario, or newer legislation like the Accessible British Columbia Act (2021) in British Columbia, for example. However, the scope of legislation varies widely, with some provinces lacking regulations or the law being narrowly applicable to certain sectors only. Other jurisdictions, including Alberta, Prince Edward Island, and the three territories, do not have dedicated accessibility legislation.
In regions without dedicated accessibility legislation, those fulfilling accessibility obligations rely primarily on human rights law and other statutory tools, such as the Copyright Act, to support the creation and distribution of accessible content for people with disabilities. As such, in this uneven landscape, the Copyright Act remains a vital national tool. The provisions and best practices highlighted in the Accessible Content guide are especially important in jurisdictions without dedicated accessibility laws, providing a consistent legal basis for creating accessible formats and helping ensure equitable access across Canada.
Who’s doing the work?
You may be wondering who is doing the remediation work of inaccessible content in Canada. While librarians serve their populations as needed, in the higher education sector, large-scale remediation falls to the accessibility offices at post-secondary institutions alongside various non-profit organizations to provide accessible formats for people with perceptual disabilities. Organizations tasked with delivering accessible materials, such as the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE), operated by Scholars Portal and the Ontario Council of University Libraries, create and share accessible formats for college and university users. In the public library sector, the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS), the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA), and the Service québécois du livre adapté (SQLA) are key players serving library systems with accessible formats across Canada.
These organizations provide essential services, yet their very necessity highlights a deep structural disconnect: accessibility is divorced from the publishing enterprise itself. Educational services, public libraries, and academic institutions must often intervene after publication to convert materials into usable formats.
What about open access?
It is worth noting that the Accessible Content guide and much of the broader conversation around accessible format creation assume that the underlying work is commercial or distributed with a copyright status of All Rights Reserved. However, even when works are intended for broad circulation, such as openly licensed scholarship, government publications, or educational resources, accessibility is not guaranteed. Availability and accessibility are not synonymous. Digital content routinely fails to meet the technical standards required by readers who rely on assistive technologies.
This is where limitations of open access become apparent. Even when research is freely available, many open access publications remain incompatible with assistive technologies as they lack semantic tagging, alt text, structured headings, or reflowable layouts. Perhaps this is a result of decentralized production practices, resource constraints, and uneven technical expertise of journal teams – conditions particularly common in diamond open access publishing.
There is an opportunity to close this gap that requires coordinated, systemic change. This could include integrating accessibility checks into editorial workflows, adopting accessible file formats as defaults, and ensuring that authors, instructors, and platform providers are trained to design for accessibility from the beginning rather than addressing it only after publication.
Moving beyond remediation
Remediation will always play a role, but it cannot be the centre of the strategy. Librarians and other practitioners know too well the constraints of the limited availability of alternate formats, the perpetual labour related to this work, and reliance on cultural and educational organizations performing this service to correct inaccessible content after publication. For users, dependence on remediation necessitates disclosing their disability, creates barriers not experienced by others, and requires negotiating access rather than receiving it from the outset.
The release of the Accessible Content guide is an important achievement within the current environment in supporting this work. Yet lasting improvement will require sharing the responsibility of a systemic transformation. Publishers, technology providers, educators, and libraries must treat accessibility not as an accommodation but as a foundational design principle. Only when accessibility is built into the publishing process will we close the gap between what is legally permissible, technically possible, and meaningfully accessible.
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Shelby Thaysen, Scholarly Publishing Librarian
University of Toronto
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