Reading for the blind: Your voice could be my eyes

 Certainly, challenges for the handicapped vary depending on the disability, but in a country with little regard for the rights of people with disabilities where regular readership is 0.01 percent, one of the most important activities that adds meaning to one’s life -- reading -- is a major challenge for the blind. Turkey’s only publisher that sells audio books, Sesli Kitaplar, offers a limited collection of world classics sold on CDs only and is almost unknown among consumers, and none of the traditional publishing houses have so far had commercial interest in dealing in audio books.

    A general disregard for the blind and low readership rates coupled with no commercial interest in the sphere of audio books by publishers and the restrictions imposed by copyright laws make it an uphill battle even for volunteer organizations to present audio books for the blind.

Turkey’s National Library, located in Ankara, has been working to fill the gap. Although it does not have a major budget allocated for its Talking Library, the library’s collection of downloadable digital audio books for the blind and those with poor vision is growing on a daily basis thanks to its nearly 100 volunteers who come in and read for those who cannot see.

According to a 2008 study from the Union of Independent Educators, on average a newly published book has 3,000 copies printed in Turkey -- a country of 70 million -- compared to Azerbaijan, where that rate is about 100,000 copies. Each person reads one-sixth of a book on average in Turkey annually, compared to Japan, where an individual reads 25 books. A Norwegian spends 300 times more hours reading than a Turk. All this data further indicate why the National Library’s Talking Library is invaluable for low-vision and blind readers.

National Library service

Speaking about the Talking Books section, “Our purpose is to serve the blind,” says Tuncel Acar, head of the National Library. The National Library is a storage place of “collective memory,” in Acar’s words. By law, a copy of every single material printed in Turkey is stored here. The National Library sorts, organizes and categorizes these documents to aid academics and researchers. However, it has also been serving the blind with the Talking Library, which first started out with books printed in Braille. Later, as technology advanced, the library started compiling audio records of books on tape, CD and DVD and finally sharing them with visually impaired users online, adhering to strict copyright restrictions. The biggest challenge they have to meet, Acar says, is copyright laws. Luckily, Turkey’s laws allow duplication of copyrighted books for the visually impaired, and now the National Library shares its audio books online with those who have obtained a password by certifying their condition with a doctor’s report or a disability card issued by the government.

Other libraries and volunteer organizations including İstanbul’s Beyazıt Library, İstanbul’s Greater Municipality Library, the small online Audio Book Volunteers community, the Ankara Altı Nokta Association for the Blind and some universities offer audio books for the blind. Most of these organizations work in collaboration with each other and the National Library.

To date, the National Library’s Talking Library has 2,500 audio books, all read out by volunteers who come into the library’s recording studios according to their assigned schedule. There are about 100 volunteers, of ages ranging from 18 to 85, who come in regularly and contribute.

Volunteer work

Ramazan Bakırcı, chief of the Talking Library, says their work is completely dependent on volunteers, some of whom are better readers than even professional thespians. To make his point, he plays an MP3 file. A soft voice reads a line in a novel, describing a situation where someone is playing an oud in the other room. Then the voice starts singing out the written word -- lyrics from a complex Turkish classical song -- at a perfect pitch and with the right tune. Of course, not all of the library’s volunteers can sing, but they all have good reading voices accepted only after passing the ultimate test: the yes vote from the listeners. When a volunteer comes to the library, first they read a shorter text for testing purposes. Then the library’s visually impaired users listen to the applicant’s recording and decide if they are a good reader. The choice of which book to turn into an audio book is also left to users, who make lists according to their wishes. This is why the library has a wide variety of books of different genres, from textbooks for visually impaired law students to popular fiction.

Although the library is grateful for its volunteers, the most common problem they encounter is people with good narrating voices who come in and start a project but do not come back and finish it. The library also needs English readers, as there are many users who are either learning English or are preparing for language exams.