Few groups benefit more from the Internet’s ability to connect than people who are blind and visually impaired. The web balances disabilities that often limit real-world mobility with equal opportunities for recreational reading, self-expression and community building through accessible media, including radio stations, online book publishers, and interactive periodicals.
Technology such as screen readers for listening to digital content also augment comprehension for those with print impairments, including those with low vision, cognitive impairments, and learning disabilities. The following article illustrates this world of accessible reading with a roundup of recent publications.
Digital and Cassette Periodicals for Blind Readers
Choice Magazine Listening
Choice Magazine Listening, a bimonthly compilation of eight hours of unabridged works from publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, the New York Times, and Sports Illustrated, can now be downloaded from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. CML features professionally narrated articles, short stories, poetry, and interviews selected from over 100 top periodicals and is free (via download or on 4-track cassette) to people with print disabilities.
ChoiceMagazineListening.org
Seeing it Our Way
Horizons for the Blind currently publishes a product catalog and a magazine. The free catalog contains craft supplies and a variety of books on crafts, recipes, adaptive techniques, blindness adjustment, and gardening. Their magazine, "Seeing It Our Way," written by the blind for the blind, features articles on crafts, patterns, recipes, and sports as well as book reviews, a brain teaser, and much more. A one-year subscription costs $30. The catalogue and magazine are available in braille and large print.
Jubilee Club Magazine
The Jubilee Club Magazine is a monthly cassette produced by and for blind readers that features messages from around the world, a travelogue, stories of triumph and tragedy, and a monthly competition. Jubilee Club Magazine is free of charge (British residents are asked to contribute two pounds annually); subscribers are asked to provide high-quality 90-minute tapes to editor Malcolm Mathews (93 Winchelsea Road, Tottenham, London, N17 6XL England) and to wrap a rubber band around any cassette that contains a message.
The Talking Voice
The Talking Voice is a tape magazine where the blind speak to one another. It features a recipe roundup, technology corner, talent show, pen friends, dating, games, prizes, and more. Contact Carl Belnap (503.857.5687) for a free sample.
Recent Books by Blind Authors
The Glass Diary, by Karen Myers: Like many young girls, Megan confides in a diary. As her blindness prevents writing on paper, Megan speaks to her mirror, the “glass diary.” This audiobook CD of reflections includes excerpts from conversations she has with her diary from age 8 to 18.
Blind counselor Carmella Broome's first book, Carmella's Quest: Taking on College Sight Unseen (Red Letter Press, Columbia, S.C.), is a memoir recounting her first year at a small Christian college in South Carolina.
Christine Faltz Grassman's novel, The Sight Sickness (iUniverse: $21.95 cloth; $11.95 paper; $6 ebook), is a response, an "anti-sequel" to Noble prizewinner Jose Saramago's psychological thriller, Blindness, which uses blindness as a metaphor for human degradation.
A visual impairment once meant isolation and having a voice that often went unheard. Technology, however, has eliminated barriers by providing platforms through which blind people can share ideas, interests, and stories and create virtual communities that enhance real lives.
Andrew Leibs - Andrew Leibs is Suite101’s Feature Writer for Accessible Recreation. He is a longtime chronicler of the disability movement with ...
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