Accessibility and Inclusive Content Toolkit: Exceptions, Formats, Circumvention, and Procurement

By Casey Scott McKay · 2025-04-14

Accessibility is the strongest position in copyright and almost nobody in the field treats it that way, which is why organisations buy converted files they are entitled to make and hold back programmes that carry less risk than anything else they publish. This toolkit collects the framework. It works section 121 and its authorised entity and eligible person definitions, the Marrakesh implementation, and the independent fair use holding that gives the same activity a second basis. It then addresses the real obstacles, which are not copyright: technical protection measures requiring a separate circumvention analysis, contract terms purporting to prohibit conversion, and procurement that buys inaccessible products and then funds remediation.

IP and Technology > Copyright | Toolkit | Published 14 April 2025 - Updated 8 October 2025 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. Accessibility is the strongest position in copyright and almost nobody in the field treats it that way, which is why organisations buy converted files they are entitled to make and hold back programmes that carry less risk than anything else they publish. This toolkit collects the framework. It works section 121 and its authorised entity and eligible person definitions, the Marrakesh implementation, and the independent fair use holding that gives the same activity a second basis. It then addresses the real obstacles, which are not copyright: technical protection measures requiring a separate circumvention analysis, contract terms purporting to prohibit conversion, and procurement that buys inaccessible products and then funds remediation.

Keywords: accessibility toolkit · Chafee Amendment · section 121 · authorised entity · eligible person · Marrakesh Treaty · section 121A · accessible formats · structured digital text · image description · braille · captioning · section 1201 circumvention · triennial exemptions · trafficking gap · licence carve outs · procurement conformance · WCAG · born accessible acquisition · time to delivery

Start Here

A blind reader in the United States has a statutory right to have a published book converted into a format they can read, and it does not require anyone's permission.

Not a licence. Not a negotiation. Not a fee. A qualifying organisation may reproduce the book, convert it, and distribute the accessible copy, and the copyright owner has no say.

And the same activity was separately held fair use by the Second Circuit, on reasoning that did not depend on the statute at all.

Two independent legal bases. In copyright practice that is about as strong as a position gets, and most publishing decisions rest on a single contested theory.

So why is accessible material scarce?

Because copyright was never the binding constraint. The constraints are technical protection measures triggering a separate statute, contract terms purporting to override the exception, procurement decisions that buy inaccessible products, and a publishing pipeline producing files nobody can remediate cheaply.

The exception is fine. Everything around it is the problem — which is why this toolkit spends more space on procurement than on doctrine.

Section 121 in Detail

17 U.S.C. § 121 — the Chafee Amendment — permits an authorised entity to reproduce, or to distribute copies or phonorecords of, a previously published literary work in accessible formats, exclusively for use by eligible persons.

Authorised entity. A nonprofit organisation or governmental agency with a primary mission to provide specialised services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities.

Apply the test to the unit, not the institution. A university does not have that primary mission; its disability services office does. A public library system does not; its accessible services department generally does. Naming the right unit is what makes a determination defensible.

Eligible person. A person who is blind; who has a visual impairment or perceptual or reading disability that cannot be improved to give visual function substantially equivalent to a person without such impairment; or who is otherwise unable, through physical disability, to hold or manipulate a book or focus or move the eyes to the extent normally acceptable for reading.

Which includes dyslexia and other reading disabilities, and physical disabilities preventing someone holding a book or turning pages. Programmes administering the exception as though it covered blindness alone are under-serving readers the statute plainly reaches.

Accessible format. An alternative manner or form giving an eligible person access, including braille, audio, digital text, and large print, with facilities enabling navigation.

Previously published literary work — the significant limitation. Unpublished works are outside it. Non-literary works are outside it.

The conditions. Copies must be reproduced and distributed exclusively for eligible persons; must bear a notice that further reproduction or distribution in a non-accessible format is an infringement; and must include a copyright notice identifying the owner and the date of original publication.

What section 121 does not require. A search for the rightsholder. A commercial availability check. Payment. Notification. Registration.

Which is why it is the strongest position in copyright. It is a permission that exists before the copying does, not a defence to be argued afterwards.

The Second Basis, and Marrakesh

Authors Guild v. HathiTrust held that providing access to a digitised corpus for print-disabled readers was fair use, without relying on section 121.

The reasoning. On the first factor, the works were written to be read and print-disabled readers had no other way of accessing them — making a work reachable by a reader who otherwise could not reach it does not compete with the ordinary market. On the fourth, the publishers had not demonstrated a functioning market for accessible copies, and the population served was one the market had largely not addressed.

Which means the fair use basis reaches things section 121 does not. Non-literary works, including captioning and audio description. Unpublished works, subject to the second factor. Entities that are not authorised entities. And uses exceeding the statute's notice or exclusivity conditions.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music supplies the framework, and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith narrowed transformative use generally without disturbing the HathiTrust reasoning, which never rested on transformation of expressive content.

17 U.S.C. § 121A implements the Marrakesh Treaty, permitting export of accessible format copies to authorised entities or eligible persons in other participating countries, and import from them.

Its conditions are practice requirements — established practices for establishing eligibility, limiting distribution, discouraging unauthorised reproduction, and maintaining due care — which for an organisation already running a proper programme is a documentation exercise that opens the export route.

And import is the underused direction. Before producing a new conversion, check whether one exists.

The Actual Obstacles

Technical protection measures

17 U.S.C. § 1201 prohibits circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work, separately from infringement. A use may be entirely lawful under section 121 while the act of defeating the encryption needed to accomplish it violates section 1201.

Universal City Studios v. Corley held fair use is not a defence to a section 1201 claim, and that the trafficking provisions reach distribution of circumvention tools regardless of purpose.

MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment held section 1201(a) creates a right distinct from copyright with no nexus requirement, expressly disagreeing with Chamberlain Group v. Skylink Technologies. The split has never been resolved.

17 U.S.C. § 1203 supplies the civil remedies.

The triennial rulemaking is the release valve, granting and repeatedly renewing accessibility exemptions covering circumvention of electronically distributed literary works to enable read-aloud and screen reader compatibility.

Three cautions. They expire every three years and renewal is not automatic. Their operative text is narrower than their summaries. And they permit acts of circumvention while leaving the trafficking provisions in force, which means an organisation may be permitted to circumvent and unable to obtain a lawful means of doing so.

That trafficking gap is the practical heart of the problem and it has persisted for two decades.

Contract terms

A licence prohibiting extraction, conversion, or derivative formats is a contract term, and whether it is preempted or unenforceable against a statutory exception is genuinely unsettled.

Fix it in the contract. A clause permitting reproduction and conversion into accessible formats for eligible persons notwithstanding other restrictions, plus an obligation to supply structured source files on reasonable request.

Publishers agree readily at negotiation and refuse during disputes. The whole trick is timing.

Read the restrictions clause, not just any accessibility clause. A general prohibition on modifying content or circumventing measures is a conversion prohibition even where nobody drafted it as one.

Procurement

Most inaccessible material an organisation holds was bought that way. A platform rendering text in a canvas no screen reader can parse. Scanned PDFs with no text layer. Video with no captions. A database that cannot be operated by keyboard.

Six contract provisions fix most of it. A named standard at a named level, using WCAG conformance as the testable specification. Conformance as a warranty rather than a roadmap. A conformance report, with a sample tested against it. Remediation obligations with severity levels, timelines, and a remedy. Accessibility in the acceptance criteria, so a non-conforming delivery is a failure to deliver. And source file and format commitments from content vendors.

Section 508 imposes much of this on federal agencies and flows through to contractors, with many states adopting parallel requirements.

And the discrimination statutes run independently. The Americans with Disabilities Act and state analogues create obligations enforced by different plaintiffs on different theories, unaffected by a perfect copyright position.

Formats, Born-Accessible, and the Programme

Structured digital text is the workhorse. Marked headings, correct reading order, real lists and tables, language declarations, navigable contents. One well-structured file serves screen readers, refreshable braille, synthetic speech, and reflowed large print.

Braille remains essential for readers who use it, particularly where spelling, notation, and precise structure matter. Refreshable displays render from structured text, which is another argument for investing at the structure layer.

Human-narrated audio for material where synthetic speech performs badly, distinct from the commercial audiobook, which is a different product for a different market.

Image description is the hardest and most-skipped element. Describe images carrying information the text does not; mark decorative images as decorative so assistive technology skips them.

Captions and transcripts for audiovisual material sit outside section 121's literary work boundary — a reason to run the fair use analysis rather than to skip the work.

The EPUB accessibility specification defines conformance and metadata declaring what a file supports before acquisition. A born-accessible file needs no conversion, no exception analysis, no circumvention question, and no remediation budget.

Make accessibility metadata an acquisition criterion, and the conversion queue shrinks permanently.

Run the conversion workflow in the order that removes work. Does an accessible edition already exist? Can the publisher supply a structured source file — the highest-value request in the programme? Does conversion require defeating a technical measure? Only then convert.

Measure three things. Time to delivery from request to usable file. Coverage at acquisition. Reader-reported usability. Volume rises reassuringly and says nothing about whether anyone was served.

Where Each Sector Gets Stuck

Higher education has the clearest entitlement and the worst timeliness. The disability services office qualifies, the material is previously published literary work, and the readers are documented by the institution's own assessment process. The failure is operational: a request in week one completing in week six, because the file must be sourced, the protection measure examined, a publisher chased, and the structure rebuilt by hand. The fix is converting from the reading list rather than from the request, since course adoptions are known months ahead.

Public libraries frequently do not realise they qualify. A system with an accessible services function generally has the primary mission the statute describes for that function, and many operate as though every accessible copy must be purchased from a specialist supplier. Some must be, because braille embossing and professional narration are genuinely expensive. Many need not be.

Schools and districts have the same entitlement and greater procurement leverage, because districts buy centrally across many schools on multi-year terms. That makes the procurement clause the first move rather than the sixth, and it sits alongside education and disability statutes that bind independently of copyright.

Employers sit outside the exception and inside a straightforward fair use analysis: the employer bought the copy, one reader uses the conversion, and no market is displaced. They also carry discrimination obligations that have nothing to do with copyright. The practical fix is a written internal position, so individual managers stop refusing on grounds nobody examined.

Government bodies are usually bound by Section 508 or a state analogue, making the procurement provisions mandatory rather than advisable. The failure is accepting a vendor conformance report and never operating the product with a keyboard.

Cultural institutions should sequence accessibility first in a digitisation programme, because it is the strongest-footed component of the whole operation and is routinely funded last.

Publishers are outside the exception and do not need it, since they own the rights. Their obstacle is that backlist source files produced before structured workflows frequently do not exist in usable form — the single largest reason older material stays inaccessible, and one no legal instrument addresses.

Technology platforms are where the largest exclusions happen and where copyright has nothing to say. An application that cannot be operated by keyboard excludes readers regardless of what its content licences permit.

Common Errors

Treating copyright as the obstacle. 17 U.S.C. § 121 is an unconditional permission and Authors Guild v. HathiTrust supplies an independent fair use basis. The obstacles are technical measures, contracts, procurement, and turnaround.

Never writing the entity determination. One page, naming the right unit and quoting its mission, converts a six-week legal review into a five-minute one.

Administering eligibility too narrowly. The definition reaches reading disabilities and physical disabilities, not blindness alone, and a verification step heavy enough to deter readers defeats the purpose.

Recording the diagnosis rather than the determination. The file needs to show eligibility was established and by what route; clinical detail creates a data protection obligation the programme does not need.

Folding circumvention into the copyright analysis. 17 U.S.C. § 1201 is a separate prohibition, fair use is not a defence to it under Corley, and the exemption expires every three years.

Relying on an exemption summary. The conditions live in the operative text, and the trafficking provisions remain in force even where the act is permitted.

Delivering a picture of a book. An image-only scan is not an accessible format. Structure, reading order, described images, and navigation are what make a file usable.

Buying what you are entitled to make. Paying a supplier for structured digital text the organisation could generate faster from a publisher source file is a budget problem disguised as a compliance decision.

Reading a licence's silence as permission. A general prohibition on modifying content is a conversion prohibition, and the fix belongs at renewal.

Accepting a conformance report unread. The gap between a self-assessment and a usable product is where most complaints originate.

And measuring volume. Conversion counts rise reassuringly and say nothing about whether a reader got the right file in time to use it.

What the Exceptions Cannot Fix

Section 121 covers previously published literary works. It does not reach film, and the audio description market for visual media is thin and expensive.

It does not reach software interfaces, which is where a great deal of exclusion actually happens. A screen reader cannot help with an application that was never built to be read, and no copyright instrument addresses it.

It does not compel anyone to produce anything. It permits conversion by qualifying entities; it does not require publishers to supply source files, and negotiating file access remains a matter of goodwill and commercial leverage.

It does not address cost. Braille embossing, professional narration, and image description at scale are expensive, and the exception makes them lawful rather than affordable.

And it does nothing about timeliness. A student who receives a converted textbook in week six of a twelve-week course has been excluded for half the term, and the copyright position is irrelevant to that. Timeliness is a workflow and procurement problem, and it is the complaint readers actually make.

The Records to Keep

Light, and they are the entire compliance story.

The entity determination. One page, dated, signed, reviewed on reorganisation.

Per reader: that eligibility was established, by what route, and when — not the clinical detail.

Per conversion: the work, its publication status, the source of the file, whether a technical measure was involved and which exemption was relied on with the date of the text consulted, the formats produced, the statutory notices applied, and the distribution control used.

Per fair use conversion outside the statute: two paragraphs. This supplies the reasonable grounds under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2) if it is ever needed.

Per export under 17 U.S.C. § 121A: the counterparty, their status, and confirmation the practice requirements were met.

Per licence: whether a conversion carve-out exists, and if a vendor refused, the date and the person — because a pattern of refusal is a procurement argument at the next tender.

Make each record a by-product of the workflow rather than a separate task. Records requiring their own effort stop being kept in the third busy month.

Cadence

Ninety days for the legal foundation. Entity determination, eligibility process, statutory notice templates, circumvention check embedded in the workflow, and one licence carve-out into one renewal.

Six months for procurement. Six provisions into the template, buyers trained, conformance reports tested. This is where the durable gains are.

Twelve months for the acquisition shift. Accessibility metadata as a purchasing criterion, source file requests built into acquisitions, and a published coverage target.

Ongoing: the triennial diary, because missing a renewal is how a programme discovers it has been operating without an exemption.

Annually, ask readers. Which title they needed first, which format they can use, and which delivered file was unusable. None of that reaches the programme unless somebody asks, and a short termly conversation outperforms every dashboard here.

And fund production rather than review. The legal work is small and one-off; the conversion work is structuring, describing, and captioning, and it is ongoing. Organisations that fund the legal review and not the capacity have a compliant programme that delivers nothing in week six.

The Conversations You Will Have

"We need the publisher's permission." Not for a previously published literary work, if you are an authorised entity converting for eligible persons. 17 U.S.C. § 121 is a permission that exists before the copying does. Asking is a courtesy that sometimes yields a source file, and it is not a precondition.

"Legal says it is too risky." Ask which risk. Infringement exposure for a section 121 conversion is nil. For a documented fair use conversion by a qualifying nonprofit, 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2) remits statutory damages. The one genuine exposure is circumvention under 17 U.S.C. § 1201, and it has a checkable answer.

"The licence prohibits extraction." A contract problem with a contract fix. Escalate to renewal; meanwhile ask the vendor to supply an accessible file rather than extracting one, which most will do.

"The vendor says the platform is accessible." Ask for the report, then operate the product with a screen reader and a keyboard.

"We already buy converted books." Check which titles you could produce faster from a publisher source file. Suppliers earn their fee on braille and narration and are often slower and dearer for structured text.

"We cannot describe every image." Prioritise informational images and mark decorative ones as decorative. Describing nothing because describing everything was impossible is the common failure.

"Nobody has complained." Complaints are a lagging and poor indicator, because readers stop asking rather than complain. Measure time to delivery instead.

"The student got the book eventually." Week six is not eventually; it is exclusion for half a term.

"Can we wait and see whether anyone needs it?" No. The readers who need it are already there, and the ones who stopped asking will not tell you. Demand is systematically under-reported by exactly the process that measures it.

A Note on Risk, Honestly

Three exposures, and only one is real.

A conversion within section 121: none. It is a statutory permission, not a defence.

A conversion outside the statute with a documented fair use analysis: ordinary infringement exposure, materially reduced for qualifying nonprofits by 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2), where a written analysis supplies the reasonable grounds.

Circumvention outside a current exemption: different in kind. 17 U.S.C. § 1203 provides civil remedies and Corley confirmed fair use is not a defence. This is the one place where a good motive genuinely does not help, which is why the exemption check must be real.

And realistically, publishers do not sue accessibility programmes. The reputational position is impossible and the statutory permission is clear, and the observed enforcement pattern over three decades is essentially nil.

Worth saying to a risk-averse general counsel, because the practical consequence of overcaution here is not safety. It is a reader who cannot read.

Which is the asymmetry that makes this area different. In almost every other part of copyright practice the cautious answer and the correct answer coincide. Here caution has a cost borne entirely by someone other than the organisation being cautious, and the reader who waits six weeks never appears in the risk register that produced the delay.

Working a Real Request End to End

A reader registers in week one with documented eligibility and a five-title list.

Eligibility. Already established by the organisation's own assessment. Record that it was established and by what route. No fresh certificate, no delay.

Title one is available as a commercial accessible ebook with declared conformance metadata. Buy it. Elapsed time: one day. This is why the availability question comes first.

Title two is held by a partner institution in an accessible collection, or is available through the Marrakesh exchange. Request it. Elapsed time: two days.

Title three is a current textbook. Ask the publisher for a structured source file, citing the accessibility programme. Many publishers have a route for this. If the file arrives, apply the statutory notices and deliver; if it does not arrive within the service level, convert from the purchased copy.

Title four is an older monograph with no digital edition. Scan, run optical character recognition, correct the structure, describe the figures, apply the notices, deliver. This is real production work and it is why the programme needs production capacity rather than legal capacity.

Title five is a proprietary courseware module wrapped in access controls with no accessible mode.

That one stops. Identify the measure, read the current exemption text, and determine whether the facts fit. If they do, record the analysis and proceed. If they do not, escalate — and in parallel go to the vendor, because a courseware supplier with no accessible mode has a contract problem under the procurement provisions and a discrimination exposure under the disability statutes that has nothing to do with copyright.

Four of five delivered inside a week. The fifth becomes a vendor escalation and a renewal negotiation, logged as such rather than sitting in a queue nobody can clear.

That is what the sequencing buys. Not a legal opinion — a reader who can start.

Named Failure Modes

The perfect file, delivered late. Every notice applied, every record kept, arriving in week six. The most common failure and the least visible, because nothing in the compliance record registers it.

The compliant scan. An image-only PDF delivered as an accessible format. It is a picture of a book.

The narrow eligibility gate. Administering the exception as though it covered blindness alone, excluding readers the statute plainly reaches.

The unread restrictions clause. A general prohibition on modifying content, sitting in a licence nobody connected to the conversion workflow.

The expired exemption. A programme relying on a rule that lapsed at the last triennial cycle because nobody diarised it.

The vendor-verified conformance report. Accepted at face value, never tested, contradicted by the first reader who tries a keyboard.

The volume dashboard. Rising reassuringly, reported annually, telling nobody whether a single reader was served.

The purchased conversion. Paying a supplier for structured text the organisation is entitled to produce and could produce faster.

The refusal on imaginary grounds. An employer or department declining an accommodation for copyright concerns that would not survive five minutes of analysis.

And the programme that never asks readers anything. Formats chosen by the team, priorities set by the queue, success defined by throughput. Readers know which title they needed first and which delivered file was unusable, and none of it reaches the programme unless somebody asks.

Why the Exception Exists, and Where It Weakens

Copyright exceptions do not usually arrive unconditional. 17 U.S.C. § 108 is hedged with conditions about notice, commercial availability, and on-premises use. 17 U.S.C. § 110(2) is hedged into near-uselessness. 17 U.S.C. § 107 is not an exception at all but a standard requiring argument every time.

Section 121 is different, and it is worth asking why.

Because the market failure was total and undisputed. There was no serious argument that a licensing market for accessible copies existed and was being displaced. Publishers were not producing braille editions. The population served had no alternative source. Nobody's business was harmed because nobody's business was doing the work.

Which is exactly the fourth-factor reasoning the Second Circuit applied independently in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, and it is why the statutory and fair use analyses converge rather than conflict.

The history explains the boundaries. The exception reaches previously published literary works because that was where the demonstrated failure was. It does not reach film or software because those markets and technologies were not what the amendment addressed. The boundaries are historical rather than principled, which is a reason to run fair use at the edges rather than treating the statutory line as the limit of what is permissible.

And it predicts where the argument gets harder. If a genuine commercial market for accessible copies develops in a category, the fourth-factor reasoning weakens there. Commercial audiobooks are the clearest example: an active market exists, and an organisation producing narrated audio of a title with a current commercial audiobook stands in a materially different position from one converting a book nobody has ever recorded.

So check availability even where the statute does not require it. Not because it is mandatory, but because it tells you which side of the market-failure reasoning you are standing on — and because where a usable commercial accessible edition exists, buying it is faster than making one.

Note the asymmetry that follows. The statutory route requires no availability check and the fair use fallback effectively does. An organisation relying on section 121 for a literary work need not ask; an organisation relying on fair use for a film, a recording, or an unpublished work should.

Escalation and Who Decides

Most of this programme should run without legal review, because a workflow requiring counsel per title does not run at all.

Route to counsel where: the work is not a previously published literary work and the analysis is fair use rather than statutory; conversion requires circumvention and the exemption fit is uncertain; a licence expressly prohibits conversion and the vendor will not amend; the organisation intends to export under 17 U.S.C. § 121A for the first time; a rightsholder has made contact; or a reader's eligibility is genuinely unclear.

Everything else runs on the workflow. A previously published book, an eligible reader, a source file or an unprotected copy, statutory notices applied, distribution controlled. That is the overwhelming majority of requests and it needs no lawyer.

Give the conversion team explicit authority to proceed and explicit authority to stop. Both halves matter; a team that can only proceed will proceed through the exceptions too.

Train on three things. What makes a reader eligible. What makes a file usable. When to stop and ask about a technical measure. Nothing else about copyright is needed at the point of conversion.

Handle rightsholder contact centrally, with one address and one owner. These are rare, and an ignored contact escalates.

Where to Start

Five things, none requiring a budget line.

Write one page confirming authorised entity status and why.

Get one licence carve-out into one renewal.

Add one accessibility clause with a named standard to one procurement template.

Check the current circumvention exemption text once and diarise the next cycle.

Then measure time to delivery for a term and see what it tells you.

Together those five change more than another year of policy drafting will, and if only one is possible, make it the procurement clause — everything else is remediation of a problem that clause would have prevented, and the queue only ever shrinks from that end.

A Closing Note

The copyright question was answered twice, once by Congress in 17 U.S.C. § 121 and once by the Second Circuit in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, and the answers agree.

Organisations that still treat accessibility as a legal risk are misreading the position badly enough to spend money on licences they do not need while leaving readers waiting.

The real work is in procurement contracts, authoring workflows, the exemption cycle, and licence terms negotiated before anyone needs them. None of it is glamorous, all of it is available now, and none of it requires permission from a rightsholder.

And the readers are students trying to finish a degree, employees trying to do their jobs, and people who want to read a novel. None of that is a compliance outcome, and a programme designed around the complaint it is trying to avoid will produce files that satisfy an auditor and frustrate a reader.

Design around the reader, and the compliance follows.

Scaling to the Organisation

A single-institution disability services office needs the determination, the eligibility process, the conversion workflow, and one procurement clause. That is a week of legal work and an ongoing production function, and it covers the realistic caseload.

A multi-campus system adds a shared determination reviewed on reorganisation, a common conversion workflow so a title converted once serves every campus, and centralised licence negotiation so the carve-out appears in every subscription rather than in whichever one somebody remembered.

A consortium or state system should build a shared accessible collection, because the highest-cost item in the sector is the same title converted independently by six institutions in the same state. That requires the distribution controls the statute assumes and a single record of what exists.

A national or specialist service operating as an authorised entity at scale should document the 17 U.S.C. § 121A practice requirements, because export is available to it and unavailable to most institutional programmes, and because it is the natural counterparty for imports.

A publisher does not need any of this and should read the born-accessible section, because the backlist source file problem is the one obstacle nothing in this toolkit solves and the one only publishers can fix.

A platform or software vendor should read the procurement section as a specification of what customers will shortly be required to demand, and the exclusion caused by an unusable interface is not addressed by any content licence.

And an employer should write the one-page internal position and stop refusing accommodations on grounds nobody examined.

The consortium point deserves emphasis. Duplicate conversion across institutions is the largest avoidable cost in the sector, and it persists because nobody owns the coordination. A shared record of what has been converted, held by a body all the participants already belong to, changes the economics of the whole programme more than any drafting in this toolkit.

And the statute already permits it, because distribution between authorised entities and to eligible persons is exactly what section 121 contemplates.

So the coordination question is organisational rather than legal, which is true of nearly everything in this toolkit and is the reason it repays being read by procurement and operations rather than only by counsel.

Send it to both, and to whoever signs the content subscriptions, because that is where the durable gains are actually made.

They will find the carve-out easier to obtain than counsel expects, and cheaper than any remediation it prevents.

Ask at the next renewal, whichever contract that happens to be, and start the template change from there.

A Suggested Reading Path

Start with the doctrine in Making Works Reachable.

Then the programme in Building an Accessible Content Programme.

Then the audit in the accessibility and IP checklist.

For the circumvention analysis, The DMCA's Other Half, the anticircumvention risk checklist, and the Anticircumvention and Repair Toolkit.

For the educational setting, the Education and EdTech IP Toolkit and Running Copyright Compliance at an Educational Institution.

For cultural institutions, the Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Heritage IP Toolkit, where accessibility should be sequenced first.

For the fair use fallback, the Fair Use and Permissions Toolkit.

And for the vendor layer, the Technology Contracts Toolkit.

Primary Authorities

| Authority | Proposition | |---|---| | 17 U.S.C. § 106 | Exclusive rights | | 17 U.S.C. § 107 | Fair use | | 17 U.S.C. § 108 | Libraries and archives | | 17 U.S.C. § 110 | Teaching exemptions | | 17 U.S.C. § 121 | Accessible formats; Chafee Amendment | | 17 U.S.C. § 121A | Cross-border accessible copies | | 17 U.S.C. § 201 | Ownership | | 17 U.S.C. § 501 | Infringement | | 17 U.S.C. § 504 | Damages; nonprofit remission | | 17 U.S.C. § 512 | Safe harbour | | 17 U.S.C. § 1201 | Circumvention; exemptions; interoperability | | 17 U.S.C. § 1203 | Civil remedies for circumvention | | Authors Guild v. HathiTrust | Accessibility conversion as fair use | | Authors Guild v. Google | Search and snippet display | | Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith | Transformative purpose narrowed | | Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music | Transformative use framework | | Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios | Substantial non-infringing uses | | Universal City Studios v. Corley | No fair use defence to 1201 | | MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment | 1201(a) distinct from copyright | | Chamberlain Group v. Skylink Technologies | Nexus requirement; circuit split | | Sega Enterprises v. Accolade | Reverse engineering as fair use | | Marrakesh Treaty | Cross-border framework | | Section 1201 accessibility exemptions | Triennial rulemaking | | Americans with Disabilities Act | Discrimination obligations | | Section 508 procurement standards | Federal procurement | | WCAG conformance | Technical standard | | EPUB accessibility specification | Born-accessible publishing |

Forms and Templates

The License Agreement Template supplies the structure for the content agreements this programme depends on, and the provision that matters is short: the licensee may reproduce and convert licensed content into accessible formats for use by eligible persons notwithstanding any other restriction, and the licensor will supply structured source files on reasonable request. Put it in the template so it appears in every draft. The other documents are shorter still — a one-page authorised entity determination naming the right unit and quoting its mission, an eligibility verification note that uses documentation the organisation already holds, a conversion record generated by the workflow, and a two-line circumvention log per item requiring authentication work.

Related Toolkits and Checklists

The Anticircumvention and Repair Toolkit covers the 17 U.S.C. § 1201 analysis that is the only genuine legal exposure here. The Fair Use and Permissions Toolkit covers the fallback where the statutory exception does not reach. The Education and EdTech IP Toolkit and the Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Heritage IP Toolkit place the programme in the two sectors that run it most, and the Technology Contracts Toolkit carries the procurement provisions that stop the queue growing.