For more than 165 years, American Printing House for the Blind (APH) has worked to expand opportunities for students and adults who are blind or have low vision. Founded in 1858, the Louisville-based nonprofit has grown into the world’s largest organization of its kind, producing braille textbooks, assessments, large-print materials, educational products, and technology. The vision is simple: creating an accessible world with opportunity for everyone.
That mission is personal to Alejandro Erick Franco, CIO and VP of IT at APH. After 25 years in Fortune 500 manufacturing, he saw the chance to combine his professional expertise in technology with his love for teaching, so he joined APH.
Much of APH’s work is in education. About 80% of its business involves developing accessible products that support learning for K-12 students, including braille textbooks and tests, classroom materials, and technology.
“Our team at APH is representative of the customers we serve,” explained Franco. “Their expertise and life experience are invaluable to our work, and it is important that all of our systems are accessible so everyone can contribute to their fullest potential.”
As a nonprofit conscious of its resources, Franco discovered when he joined APH that its systems had become outdated. Its website, meant to serve parents and teachers, was confusing even for sighted users—and nearly unusable with a screen reader. “The website had 147 links on the main page,” Franco recalled. “Navigating the website was cumbersome for all users.”
Online sales hovered around $3–4 million annually, but manual processes had to be used for customers to track orders or receive updates. The ERP system was used primarily as a finance tool, missing basic capabilities such as electronic invoicing, order tracking, and support for multi-currency and international accounting. For APH to expand globally, its technology foundation had to change.
An Accessibility-First Transformation
The first step? A website relaunch, built around accessibility. The results were dramatic: web visits surged to 1.5 million annually, with visitors spending more than 90 seconds on average. E-commerce sales expanded massively, growing revenue that could be reinvested into educational tools and services.
Next came ERP modernization. Franco evaluated major vendors by dialing their main numbers and asking a single question: “Did they have accessibility teams?” Some had cut staff, others deprioritized accessibility, and one required “an army of calls” to reach the right people, he said.
For Franco, the difference with SAP came down to accessibility being more than a promise. Reaching Andreas Huppert with SAP in Germany, Franco noted that SAP even provided a tool to measure system accessibility by module and process, which left him “speechless.” When Franco later met SAP’s global CIO at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, the executive recognized the APH logo and shared that his grandfather had used APH materials. “He took the time to understand what we’re doing and why accessibility mattered. That meant a lot,” Franco said.
“The one that had everything was SAP, so I knew [that was] the answer for accessibility,” Franco noted. “It’s complex, it’s expensive, but it does the job.”
The deployment model was just as important as vendor choice. APH wanted to simplify IT and avoid costly customizations, opting for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. “You can configure the system to solve your needs. You cannot customize the system,” Franco said. “For us, it’s a hallelujah.” This also meant forgetting about servers, patching, and paying somebody else to run the system.
APH prepared a detailed scorecard and accessibility test scenarios—from entering orders without a mouse to checking calendar navigation and running reports—and proceeded with the project.
The public-cloud rollout is planned to culminate at APH in 2026, in the customer service, quality control, and IT departments.
Innovation and Impact
Even as APH rebuilt core systems, it also designed new tools for the people it serves. The most ambitious is the Monarch, the first braille device to showcase multiline braille and tactile graphics on the same screen. Traditional devices showed only 20–40 braille characters per line, making reading and math cumbersome, whereas the Monarch shows 10 lines of braille.
The Monarch uses new electromagnetic braille cells that can be stacked in rows, along with touch sensors and new braille symbols for navigation. This new eBraille standard adds proper formatting such as indentation, spacing, and tactile graphics. Franco pointed to examples like feeling the outline of a whale or the Eiffel Tower, images once inaccessible in braille.
Long-term cost savings are another advantage. “The Monarch is expensive,” Franco acknowledged, “But in the long run, it saves money.” A single algebra textbook can cost $20,000 to produce, and students may need nearly 200 volumes per semester. By storing textbooks digitally, Monarch reduces production costs and puts learning control directly in students’ hands.
Equity is central to APH’s mission, as sighted children receive laptops and textbooks free of charge in schools. Franco argued that federal funding should ensure blind or low-vision students receive the same accommodations. Accessibility often costs more when treated as an add-on, he said, but inclusive design avoids passing those costs onto individuals.
By making accessibility the foundation of its transformation, APH has grown in scale and influence. Revenue rose from $3–4 million to more than $60 million as the new site drew global customers. The accessible ERP opened new roles for employees who are blind or have low vision, and the organization itself has become an exemplar for others of how inclusive systems can drive growth and equity.
Franco believes the real test of APH’s transformation is whether it continues to open doors for people who have too often been excluded. That includes deploying AI tools on the shop floor so employees who are blind can succeed in roles like quality inspection—jobs many organizations would never have considered accessible.
For other CIOs, the lesson is simple: accessibility is both practical and powerful. “By equipping employees with the right tools and comprehensive training, organizations foster a capable, confident workforce—one that drives consistent performance, enhances collaboration, and contributes to a dynamic, goal-oriented workplace culture,” said Franco.