UNICEF, Bhutan's Ministry of Education & PubCoder — AI-Automated Accessible Digital Textbooks for Students with Disabilities

Since 2017, UNICEF's Accessible Digital Textbooks (ADT) initiative has worked with national education authorities to convert curriculum materials into Universal-Design-for-Learning formats — adding synchronised narration, sign-language video, audio description and adjustable text. From 2024, UNICEF partnered with OpenAI to build a generative-AI pipeline automating much of this conversion.

In Bhutan, UNICEF worked with the Ministry of Education and Skills Development to train national curriculum experts, classroom teachers and special-education specialists to produce accessible digital storybooks using the PubCoder authoring tool. The resulting titles were piloted in 19 schools with children with disabilities, part of a South Asia rollout alongside Nepal.

The AI pipeline cut production time for each accessible textbook from the previous 6-9 months (costing USD 20,000-50,000) to a matter of days. Across the eight-country cohort including Bhutan, UNICEF reports 1,975,329 students used accessible digital textbooks and 84,818 teachers were trained between November 2024 and July 2025 (regional totals; Bhutan-specific figures are not separately published). The latest PubCoder version scored zero validation issues on the independent Ace-by-DAISY accessibility checker, down from 516 issues in an earlier version.

The evidence available is production, reach and technical-compliance data rather than a measured learning-outcome study: there is no published comparison of reading comprehension or engagement for Bhutanese students using accessible digital textbooks versus standard textbooks.