"Creating eBooks for the Visually Impaired" LG Uplus Launches 'U+ Hope Books' Initiative

Production Period for eBooks for the Disabled... Reduced from 7 Months to 1 Week
Family Participates in Sentence and Spacing 'Proofreading' Together

[Asia Economy Reporter Eunmo Koo] LG Uplus announced on the 9th that it will carry out the ‘U+ Hope Book’ initiative to create electronic books (e-books) for the visually impaired. This movement aims to guarantee the right to read for 250,000 visually impaired people nationwide and to bridge the knowledge and cultural gap between people with and without disabilities.

E-books for the visually impaired refer to alternative books that express regular books through multimedia content such as images, videos, text, and braille files. ‘U+ Hope Book’ is a social contribution activity where LG Uplus employees, together with their families, use the program of the disability support organization ‘IT-ro Open Library’ to produce e-books for the visually impaired.

Until now, visually impaired people have faced inconvenience due to the lack of books expressed in braille, making it difficult to read the books they want. To address this, a service was introduced that produces requested books as e-books for the visually impaired, but the long production time has not significantly alleviated their inconvenience.

To produce an e-book, a regular book must be converted into braille, audio, etc., and this process involves scanning the entire book and manually inspecting it. Since it is done manually, it took about seven months to create one e-book. Accordingly, LG Uplus plans to divide participants into groups to work on e-book production, shortening the completion period to one week.

Employees participate in the ‘proofreading’ process of the e-books. This involves correcting incorrect characters or spacing to improve completeness. Careful proofreading is an essential process because errors can reduce the visually impaired’s understanding of the book’s content.

LG Uplus plans to produce e-books focusing on bestsellers and new books that are highly requested by the visually impaired, aiming to produce about 160 e-books by the end of the year. The completed e-books will be delivered to ‘IT-ro Open Library’ and the ‘National Library for Persons with Disabilities.’ Visually impaired people can access and use the e-books online for free.

In the future, LG Uplus plans to consider continuous support measures for the visually impaired. In the mid to long term, it will also consider developing an ‘integrated app’ that allows access to different braille book-related programs from various disability libraries through a single app.

Kim Jeong-ho, CEO of IT-ro Open Library, said, “Through cooperation with LG Uplus, we can spread a corporate social contribution model suitable for the untact era,” and added, “IT-ro Open Library will continue to strive to solve social problems through technological innovation.”

Baek Yong-dae, head of LG Uplus CSR team, said, “Participating in e-book production with their children is expected to not only enhance Korean language learning effects but also provide a positive experience that increases understanding of the visually impaired,” and added, “LG Uplus plans to fully implement ESG management by supporting socially vulnerable groups, including the visually impaired, in the future.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.