The Shanghai Library launched a pilot digital service in partnership with the Shanghai Disabled Person’s Federation on December 3rd, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, to facilitate the barrier-free access to the library resources.

The initiative, supported by the Shanghai Municipal Economic & Informatization Commission, is aimed at the 940,000 or so disabled persons currently living in Shanghai. More than 158,000 of them are reported visually impaired.

This brand-new service, featuring various digitized resources and assistive toolbars on the website, will effectively minimize the information gap that has been long harassing the elderly and disabled people of the city via the extended access to the library holdings and services.

Still in a trial stage, the initiative now provides free disabled-friendly digital library service to all registered patrons across the city, including some 2,000 readers who are physically challenged. This includes 300 titles sound books and 620 Shanghai Library lecture video clips amounting to 1,000 hours. By early the next year when the service is scheduled to be applied to the practical operation, more than 2,000 titles of sound books and all real-time lecture videos will become accessible.

In addition, the web portal of the Shanghai Library (www.library.sh.cn) has undergone a DfA revision to provide more conveniences– contents of the web pages can now be both viewed and heard via the Text-to-Speech technology; the newly developed assistive toolbar helps people who have browsing difficulties to read the pages; sound, videos and pictures in a web page can be well converted into pure texts; also available are functions which enable search, preview, speech navigation and following reading of all the e-books.