» According to the International Labour Union, “One out of every six people in the world – or 1 billion people – has a disability. Between 785 and 975 million of them are estimated to be of working age, but most do not work.”1» Many countries do not have the necessary mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of people with disabilities.» The World Health Organization cites several studies reporting that people with mental health difficulties or intellectual impairments have the lowest employment rates, including one that found people with intellectual impairments were three to four times less likely to be employed than people without disabilities — and more likely to have more frequent and longer periods of unemployment.

» 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired: 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision. » About 90 percent of the world’s visually impaired people live in developing countries. » About 65 percent of visually impaired people are 50 and older; an estimated 19 million children worldwide are visually impaired. » Today, blind and visually impaired people use a simple mobile phone for daily telephone communications. They also use an array of specialty devices, such as audio book-readers, color readers, navigation tools, raised Braille labels, special bar-code scanners, and large-buttoned Braille-raised MP3 players. Each device has a unique UI, and the lack of integration makes them difficult to use. Collectively, these devices are prohibitively expensive.» Audio-books, magazines, and periodicals are an important form of entertainment for blind and visually impaired people. However, no timely, secure, affordable system exists today to provide these materials.

• According to Renaissance High School, many Japanese high school students are dissatisfied with the traditional curriculum and prefer to study topics that are of personal interest or related to a potential profession.• Without a high school diploma, students have greater difficulty landing steady jobs, and the full-time employment rate of high school dropouts is relatively low, putting a strain on the nation’s social welfare system.1• Many Japanese high school students are dissatisfied with the inflexible, uniform content of their education and often suffer from loss of motivation.• In Japan, the need for digitization of education has been discussed for a long time; the government has just begun to focus on introducing digital textbooks.