When Dang Hoai Phúc was nine years old, a landmine explosion in his family’s backyard changed his life forever. Growing up in post-war Viet Nam, remnants of conflict were an ever-present danger. For Phúc, that moment marked not only the loss of his sight, but the beginning of a journey that would ultimately shape his life’s mission: expanding access to education and opportunity for people who are blind or visually impaired in Viet Nam.
Today, Phúc is the Executive Director of the Sao Mai Center for the Blind, an organization that empowers visually impaired people through assistive technology, education, and employment support. But his path to leadership began with the same barriers many still face today.
After losing his sight, Phúc enrolled in a school for the blind, where he learned braille and continued his studies through primary and secondary education, often in inclusive classrooms alongside sighted students. Access to learning materials, however, remained a constant challenge. “Educational materials were the key difficulty,” he recalls. “Even today, it is still a challenge.”
That experience would later inform his work. As a young student, Phúc had the opportunity to participate in a computer training project aimed at equipping blind learners with digital skills. It opened new possibilities for independence and learning, and strengthened his commitment to advancing digital accessibility and education for visually impaired people in Viet Nam, which he would later continue through his involvement with the Sao Mai Center for the Blind.
At its core, Sao Mai, established in 2001, focuses on harnessing technology to break down barriers. The organization develops software solutions, produces accessible academic materials, and supports visually impaired students as they transition into higher education and the workforce. Its programs extend beyond education, offering vocational training, career guidance, and job placement support.
Yet the transition from education to employment remains complex. “If students complete university but cannot find jobs, the whole process could be seen as a waste of time,” Phúc explains. “Accessibility must lead to real opportunities.”
Technology has been central to this effort. Over the years, Sao Mai has developed tools tailored to local needs, including early Vietnamese text-to-speech systems and accessible software capable of converting complex materials, including mathematics and music, into formats usable by blind readers. These innovations have not only supported learners in Viet Nam but have also been shared with partners in other countries.
Phúc’s work has also evolved through international collaboration. Between 2018 and 2021, Sao Mai benefited from training and technical assistance through WIPO’s Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), producing nearly 1,000 accessible educational books. Today, Phúc serves as a trainer himself, supporting new ABC-led projects with the Viet Nam Blind Association and the Viet Nam Institute of Educational Sciences.
Through these initiatives, both organizations are building capacity to produce accessible books in Vietnamese, helping to expand the availability of materials for students across the country. These initiatives are funded by the WIPO Australia Funds-in-Trust, a program made possible due to the generous contributions of the Government of Australia, and which supports activities to help developing and least developed countries in the Asia and the Pacific Region build their intellectual property systems and capabilities to facilitate innovation, investment and technology transfer.
This progress has been reinforced by Viet Nam’s accession to the Marrakesh Treaty in 2022 and its implementation into national law in 2023. In practical terms, this means that organizations in Viet Nam can now convert books into accessible formats and share them with visually impaired readers — without needing to ask publishers first.
“In Viet Nam, the treaty is working quite well,” Phúc notes. “There is growing awareness, and more organizations are becoming involved in producing accessible materials.”
However, important challenges remain. One of the most persistent is the limited access to publishers’ source files. Without editable digital versions, organizations must rely on scanning printed books, performing optical character recognition, and manually correcting errors, which is a time-consuming process that slows production. While the Marrakesh Treaty removes the legal barrier, the practical barrier of obtaining workable source files remains.
At the heart of this issue is trust. “There is still a gap in understanding between publishers and organizations,” Phúc explains. “Publishers are concerned about content control, especially for textbooks, where regulations are strict.”
Building that trust and encouraging “born-accessible” publishing practices - where books are designed to be accessible from the outset, rather than converted after the fact - will be critical for long-term progress. Phúc believes that stronger government incentives and closer collaboration between stakeholders could help accelerate this shift.
Despite these challenges, there are clear signs of progress. Training programs are strengthening local expertise, partnerships are expanding, and more visually impaired students are gaining access to education than ever before.
Looking ahead, Phúc sees both opportunities and risks in emerging technologies. Advances such as artificial intelligence have the potential to significantly enhance accessibility, but they must be guided by inclusive design principles and supportive regulatory frameworks.
“Accessibility should be part of the design from the beginning,” he emphasizes. “It should not come later.”
For Phúc, the ultimate goal is a society where accessibility is not an afterthought, but a standard, where visually impaired individuals can study, work, and live independently without unnecessary barriers.
Reflecting on his own journey, he offers a perspective shaped by both hardship and resilience. Inclusion, he believes, starts from within. “You have to include yourself first,” he says. “Acquire the skills to make friends and get to know people. Positivity is key to getting support.”
It is a message grounded in lived experience, and one that continues to guide his work as he helps build a more inclusive future for Viet Nam.
About ABC
The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) is a public-private partnership led by WIPO that, together with its many partners around the world, has had real impact over the past decade. Since its inception, the ABC Global Book Service catalogue has quadrupled in size to over one million titles thanks to the inclusion of the collections of participating authorized entities. ABC delivered a total of 240,500 accessible digital files from the ABC catalogue to persons with print disabilities through its authorized entities in 2025. In addition, through ABC’s training and technical assistance partners, more than 24,000 textbooks have been made accessible in over 40 low-income countries, improving access to education for thousands of young people. ABC was established in June 2014 to implement the goals of the Marrakesh Treaty.
About WIPO
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the global forum for intellectual property policy, services, information and cooperation. A specialized agency of the United Nations, WIPO assists its 194 Member States in developing a balanced international IP legal framework to meet society's evolving needs. It provides business services for obtaining IP rights in multiple countries and resolving disputes. It delivers capacity-building programs to help developing countries benefit from using IP. And it provides free access to unique knowledge banks of IP information.