Books for the Blind

Posted by Jennifer Jensen Aug 23, 2007

We write because we need to, because we have a story to tell. And because we love telling stories, we also love reading them. Would you consider spending a bit of time helping those who can’t read stories to still enjoy them as much as we do?

An organization called Bookshare.org believes that “that people with print disabilities should have the same ease of access to books and periodicals that people without disabilities enjoy.”

They also believe that access to books should be plentiful and inexpensive, so they’ve started a community-based project using volunteers to scan books in an OCR format (copyright use is approved) and provide them by subscription to print-impaired people—blind, visually-impaired, dyslexic, etc.

Why Bookshare? First, because the focus is on providing a huge number of books, they use a synthesized voice (which actually sounds pretty decent) as opposed to professional narrators, and a large volunteer force. Subscribers can listen to the books on their computer, print them out in Braille, or enlarge the font size and either print or read from the screen. Another plus is that the digitized format is searchable—it’s hard to do research with an audiobook.

What can you do to help? The easiest and most fun is probably the step between scanning and distribution: validation. Bookshare.org needs volunteers to read the scanned book and check for errors. You don’t need anything but access to a computer and the internet, and a love for reading. They’d like to have an hour a week, but they’ll work with you and your time constraints, as well as your reading preferences.

Interested? Check out www.bookshare.org, and thanks in advance for your help.