A little-noticed announcement last week could soon make it much easier for vision-impaired people to be able to get access to books that previously weren’t available to them.

Vision Australia — the largest service provider for people who are blind or have low vision in Australia — estimates that just 5% of books are accessible in formats for blind or vision-impaired people because copyright law in many countries prevents the copying of books into other formats.

The Marrakesh Treaty, signed by Australia and 51 other nations including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, is aimed at fixing that and requires countries to modify their copyright law to allow copies of works to be made in an accessible format. And once an accessible copy is made in one country that country is able to provide that copy to other countries that have ratified the treaty for local distribution. For example, today an organisation that wants to get a braille version of the Harry Potter book series would need to have the translation made in the country in which the book would be offered. Under the Marrakesh Treaty, Vision Australia would be able to get the same braille conversion from a country that had already undertaken that work without the need to double up on the conversion.

Blind Citizens Australia and Vision Australia, particularly its general manager of advocacy Maryanne Diamond, have been working on getting Australia to ratify the agreement for the past few years. The treaty will mean the costs for copying books into accessible formats, such as braille, large print or audio books, will not only be allowed under Australian law, but will be much cheaper for Vision Australia to provide at scale. There are an estimated 350,000 blind or low-vision people in Australia, but through sharing arrangements with other countries in the treaty, there will be much more scale.

Last week Australia became only the 12th country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty since it was signed in 2013, but it will still be some time before the benefits of the treaty begin to bear fruit. The treaty doesn’t come into effect until 20 countries ratify it. India, Mali, Mexico and Uruguay are among those countries that have already ratified it, but big content producers including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have yet to ratify the agreement. Canada is expected to ratify in the near future.

The move to ratify Marrakesh had been a long time coming, but is the first major copyright policy announcement from Communications Minister Mitch Fifield since taking over responsibility for copyright matters from Attorney-General George Brandis after Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister.

Vision Australia is now lobbying the government to introduce audio-description services on free-to-air television, which would narrate programs to describe the scenes in the program between dialogue. A Change.org petition has been started calling on Fifield to implement the change, which Diamond has said has been available on US TV since the ’80s, and was introduced in New Zealand in 2012.