“I would have loved reading to have changed my life, but I am visually impaired and as there were no books in accessible formats, in my school it didn’t happen.” Having worked in Sightsavers programs around the world over the past thirty years, I can imagine this comment coming from hundreds of thousands of frustrated young visually impaired students who are part of our programs in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia as they hear about the GPE’s latest campaign. It is unacceptable that only about 5% of all books published annually in industrialized countries, and less than 1% in developing countries, are available in special formats such as braille, large print or Daisy Audio that visually impaired and others with disabilities, such as dyslexia, can use. The Daisy Forum of India, which develops and shares materials for visually impaired, states that only 500 (or 0.5%) of the 100,000 new books published in India in 2009 are accessible to visually impaired. Can you imagine walking to the public library in your home town just to find that 99.5% of the books are chained and padlocked so you cannot read and enjoy them? Thanks to technological advances it is now possible to include accessible formats in addition to the standard inkprint hardback and paperback. Sadly, what is missing is the political will to protect the human rights of visually impaired and other print disabled readers. So why is it that the publishers continue to silo this small and reading community? Instead of considering us as purchasing customers, publishers offer licenses to charities so they can produce accessible formats at their own considerable expense. In addition, national copyrights prevent charities from sharing these books with blind organizations in neighbouring countries. A typical example of this was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, had to be re-engineered in five English- language braille editions and eight English-language Daisy audio editions because the UK or the Australian or the New Zealand editions could not be shared with the global English speaking community of visually impaired. It was only six years ago that the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was agreed at the United Nations. Already three-quarters of the UN Member States have signed the Convention. It states that intellectual property rights should not constitute an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to access by persons with disabilities. The World Blind Union and its member organizations in over 180 countries have been campaigning to allow for cross-border sharing of accessible titles. It is worth pointing out the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and UNESCO have been deliberating action for 30 years. In 1985 a detailed report recommended a binding international law to allow the production and global distribution of special formats for the blind. In 2012, no action has taken place. Unfortunately WIPO does not use voting to decide issues, but rather consensus, which enables individual countries such as the United States and regional blocks such as the European Union with large and powerful publishing industries to outweigh the majority of developing countries who are in support of the Treaty. The ‘Reading Changed My Life’ campaign of the Global Partnership for Education provides an opportunity to highlight both how reading has changed the lives of so many but also the ongoing discrimination against visually impaired from around the world. Let us use the next couple of months to really show that reading can change lives by encouraging many entries to the GPE competition. But let us also draw the attention of our governments to the need to support the WIPO Treaty for Copyright for the Visually Impaired and Print Disabled People, They should enjoy reading as much as anyone else!