The Practitioners’ Guide to Using the Copyright Act of Canada to Make Accessible Content for People with Print Disabilities

This article documents the process and guidelines developed to respond to a library practitioner’s question as to what constitutes a reasonable search, in the context of section 32 of the Canadian Copyright Act. In answering the question, the authors decided that a Canadian guide would be helpful to all practitioners facing the same question, and they undertook a project to create “Accessible Content: A Guide to the Canadian Copyright Act on Searching for Accessible Formats and Producing and Distributing Alternate Formats” (----, 2025). The authors formed a multi-stakeholder coalition, and developed a set of guidelines aimed at aiding practitioners to understand and apply the exceptions in the Copyright Act that enable the reproduction of works for persons with perceptual disabilities.