Flex Picture Ebook aims to develop practices at European and international level among teachers and publishers in terms of the use and production of accessible illustrated digital books. The use of accessible digital books meets the needs of both children with disabilities and the general public. We wanted to encourage new educational and family uses in the long term, improve understanding of the specific needs of readers with disabilities, and provide publishers and transcribers with completely royalty-free tools to design accessible digital picture books more easily so that they can produce large numbers of digital picture books at low cost in many publishing fields (fiction, non-fiction, educational).
Access to children's literature is a valuable tool for acquiring fundamental skills: reading, comprehension, oral expression and imagination development. Many children do not have access to children's books due to sensory, cognitive, intellectual or motor impairments, and find themselves at a disadvantage in terms of equal opportunities. The range of accessible books is insufficient and sometimes too expensive, as it requires specific, sometimes highly technical skills and manufacturing processes. We applied for this project to develop a virtuous system that would enable the production of innovative illustrated educational resources that are both accessible and less expensive to produce, so that the supply of books that meet the needs of all pupils, including those with reading difficulties or who are prevented from reading due to a disability, would increase in both quantity and quality. We wanted to exchange ideas with stakeholders from other countries in connection with teachers, children with disabilities of various kinds, and transcribers/adaptors in order to obtain more feedback from the field, greater visibility, and more influence in spreading our innovative Flex Picture Ebook solution.