Aria Indrawati remembers the sound of cassette tapes turning late into the night.
Partially sighted since birth, her family had to record entire textbooks using an old tape recorder just so she could keep up with her law classes in Indonesia. With no formal support from her school or university, Aria’s academic journey was built on resilience, cassette reels, and the love of her family—especially her mother, who tirelessly recorded page after page of criminal and civil law texts.
I just wanted to study like everyone else,” Aria says. “But except for my family, no one cared about me—even my school.
Today, Aria is leading the charge to ensure that no other visually impaired student in Indonesia has to face that kind of isolation. As a public relations officer at Mitra Netra, a foundation dedicated to supporting people with visual disabilities in Indonesia, she’s helping make textbooks accessible in braille, audio, and digital formats.
Across the South China Sea, in Vietnam, Dinh Viet Anh shares a similar story—and the same dream.
"I used to sit in class with my sighted friends while they followed along on their textbooks," recalls Viet Anh, who was diagnosed with corneal degeneration at the age of three and lost her sight completely in grade 9. "When exams came, I didn’t have a single page of material to study. It made me feel alone and helpless."
But like Aria, she refused to give up. With the help of her family and friends—who read her English textbooks letter by letter because they couldn’t read English—she went on to earn a master’s degree in public administration and now serves as Vice President of the Vietnam Blind Association (VBA).
What unites Aria and Viet Anh is not just their personal experience with blindness—it’s their relentless commitment to rewriting the narrative for others like them. Their stories are part of a larger regional effort to advance accessibility and inclusion for people with visual impairments.
WIPO’s Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) is leading a two-year regional project funded by WIPO Australia Funds-In-Trust, which aims to support activities to help developing and least developed countries in the Asia and the Pacific Region build their intellectual property systems and capabilities to facilitate innovation, investment and technology transfer. As part of the ABC training and technical assistance project, Mitra Netra in Indonesia and VBA in Vietnam will receive training in the latest accessible book production techniques and then funding to produce hundreds of accessible textbooks in braille and digital formats. The goal: to empower students who are visually impaired to fully participate in education and society.
In Indonesia, the project will deliver 320 electronic (EPUB 3) textbooks and 50 braille books by June 2026—focusing especially on math and Arabic language materials, which are key subjects in the country’s schools and Islamic universities. Mitra Netra’s online library now hosts over 2,000 accessible books, reaching more than 2,000 members nationwide.
In small villages, accessibility isn’t seen as a priority because people don’t believe blind children will succeed,” Aria explains. “This library, this project, it changes that. It gives parents hope, and it gives students a future".
In Vietnam, the VBA is producing 100 educational books in accessible digital formats (EPUB, audio, and digital braille) and printing 150 braille copies for primary to university-level students. Also participating in the ABC project is the National Center for Special Education (NCSE), a center under the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences at the Ministry of Education and Training, which will also produce another 100 accessible digital titles. With the support of Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training and other partners, these books are already being distributed to schools and rehabilitation centers across the country. Following completion of the project, digital copies are not only uploaded to the domestic online platform but are also expected to be available through WIPO’s ABC Global Book Service—a global library catalog with more than 1,000,000 titles in accessible formats.
“Textbooks are the foundation of learning,” says Viet Anh. “Without them, blind students are left behind.”
Both women have also played pivotal roles in advancing the Marrakesh Treaty, a landmark international agreement that allows the cross-border exchange of accessible books for people who are blind or visually impaired.
Aria worked closely with Indonesia’s Ministry of Law to pave the way for treaty ratification in 2020 and helped draft exceptions to the national copyright law to allow for the reproduction of books not only in braille, but also in other multimedia formats. Viet Anh, through the VBA, has been instrumental in promoting the treaty’s implementation across Vietnam—working with the country’s copyright office, libraries, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to raise awareness and share best practices.
Their advocacy is already bearing fruit. Both Mitra Netra and VBA are now Authorized Entities under the Marrakesh framework, meaning they can legally produce and share accessible books with other institutions worldwide.
“This is not just about books,” says Viet Anh. “It’s about giving blind students the tools to dream, to succeed, to be included.”
>Aria agrees: “What I went through—listening to recorded books by myself on old cassette tapes—that shouldn’t happen to anyone else. This work is my way of making sure it doesn’t.”
By transforming personal challenges into collective action, they are helping to build a future where blindness is no longer a barrier to education. With each accessible book, they are not just rewriting the rules—they are rewriting the future for generations to come.
Background
According to a 2017 study published in The Lancet, approximately 253 million people are blind or visually impaired world-wide. Nearly 90% of these are resident in developing countries, where the World Blind Union (WBU) estimates that people who are blind have only a one in ten chance of going to school or getting a job. A lack of accessible books remains a very real barrier to getting an education and leading an independent, productive life.
About ABC
The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) is a public-private partnership led by WIPO that, together with its many partners around the world, has had real impact over the past decade. Since its inception, the ABC Global Book Service catalogue has quadrupled in size to over one million titles thanks to the inclusion of the collections of participating authorized entities. ABC delivered a total of 225,000 accessible digital files from the ABC catalogue to persons with print disabilities through its authorized entities in 2024. In addition, through ABC’s training and technical assistance partners, more than 20,000 textbooks have been made accessible in over 40 low-income countries, improving access to education for thousands of young people. ABC was established in June 2014 to implement the goals of the Marrakesh Treaty.
About WIPO
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the global forum for intellectual property policy, services, information and cooperation. A specialized agency of the United Nations, WIPO assists its 193 member states in developing a balanced international IP legal framework to meet society's evolving needs. It provides business services for obtaining IP rights in multiple countries and resolving disputes. It delivers capacity-building programs to help developing countries benefit from using IP. And it provides free access to unique knowledge banks of IP information.