Last update: December 2024

1 Importance of inclusivity

‍

Inclusivity is at the heart of the United Nations' efforts to communicate effectively and make information available to all. This commitment is enshrined in the 2019 United Nations Disability Inclusion Strategy (UNDIS).

About 16 percent of the world population has a disability (WHO, 2023). Disabilities may impact vision, hearing, mobility, cognitive functions or other areas. They result from the interplay between an individual impairment and the surrounding environment.

FAO seeks to ensure that persons with disabilities are adequately represented through inclusive language and visuals and that they can access FAO content with ease. These guidelines are intended for use by FAO personnel involved in developing or producing publications. They cover the principles for writing and producing accessible publications and offer practical tips on how to do this within the FAO publishing environment.

TOP

Publishing at FAO

Some rights reserved. This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 IGO licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode).

Under the terms of this licence, this work may be copied, redistributed and adapted for non-commercial purposes, provided that the work is appropriately cited. In any use of this work, there should be no suggestion that FAO endorses any specific organization, products or services. The use of the FAO logo is not permitted. If the work is adapted, then it must be licensed under the same or equivalent Creative Commons licence. If a translation of this work is created, it must include the following disclaimer along with the required citation: “This translation was not created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this translation. The original [Language] edition shall be the authoritative edition.”

Disputes arising under the licence that cannot be settled amicably will be resolved by mediation and arbitration as described in Article 8 of the licence except as otherwise provided herein. The applicable mediation rules will be the mediation rules of the World Intellectual Property Organization http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/mediation/rules and any arbitration will be conducted in accordance with the Arbitration Rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL).

‍Third-party materials. Users wishing to reuse material from this work that is attributed to a third party, such as tables, figures or images, are responsible for determining whether permission is needed for that reuse and for obtaining permission from the copyright holder. The risk of claims resulting from infringement of any third-party-owned component in the work rests solely with the user.

‍Sales, rights and licensing. FAO information products are available on the FAO website (www.fao.org/publications) and can be purchased through publications-sales@fao.org. Requests for commercial use should be submitted via: www.fao.org/contact-us/licence-request. Queries regarding rights and licensing should be submitted to: copyright@fao.org.