A total of 16 volumes, almost 8,000 pages of e-text, 600 hours of audio, and 6.75 gigabytes of information: every volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reports on residential schools is now available for free and open download in e-text and Daisy audio formats.

The French and English reports can be found by searching the NNELS site, or by visiting the NNELS TRC page. The Daisy versions of the reports are produced using synthetic narration and are full-text searchable using standard Daisy readers. The reports are also available in PDF format from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and in print format from Lorimer (Executive Summary) and McGill-Queen’s University Press (Reports).

Diana Davidson, Director of Alberta’s Public Library Services Branch, one of eight provincial and territorial NNELS partners, said, “NNELS is proud to be making these reports available to Canadians with print disabilities. Conversations acknowledging our difficult pasts are crucial to building a different future. Having the report available to all readers ensures everyone can be part of the dialogue.”

The e-text and Daisy formats are optimized for accessibility so they can be read by people with print disabilities using a variety of tools and technologies. However, like all the TRC reports, these copies are in the public domain so anyone can download and share the files freely.

We hope our efforts contribute to more people participating in the historic conversations about reconciliation.

We also hope our work honours the thousands of people whose stories and skills helped create these thorough records of one of the most destructive chapters of Canada’s history.

Thank You

Our thanks to Ry Moran for early encouragement and directing us to the files we needed. Thanks also to Ryan Van Huijstee at McGill-Queen’s University Press for kindly and efficiently sharing files with us a year ago.

We also thank NNELS team members past and present for spending hundreds of hours editing e-text documents and troubleshooting Daisy conversion errors. In particular: Cynthia Ng for inexhaustible corralling and heavy lifting, and Aleks Neumann for hours of endnotes.

Thank you to the NNELS project leaders who determined this was important work for us to do.