Audiobooks at their heart (at least in the form of “talking books”) were made with accessibility in mind after all. Pretty much every new book that comes out is recorded as an Audiobook in some fashion as well. Audible exclusives always felt quite scummy for that reason alone, as it is restricting what is at it’s heart an accessible media format.
I’m very curious if it’s mainstream popularity though has led to more blind/visually impaired people being able to consume more books than before. It would be really cool if it has or has at least loosened that barrier a bit more!
Always have.
Books on tape goes back decades, and blind folks have access to such things via mail for free (or, they did back when I was still working).
Last I had noticed, they had switched to CDs rather than tapes, but the service still existed.
Libraries often have digital audiobooks via libby.
Blind people have been using the various options since they came into existence.
@southsamurai @gabe Now it’s all downloadable, not so much CD’s anymore.
As the technology progresses, I think it’d be cool if someone made make an eBook reader that could also use text-to-speech to read basically any book in a fairly natural way.
Of course it’s no match for a properly-acted audiobook, but it’d go a long way to making things more accessible I think.
Or we just conscript Stephen Fry and put him to work until we have him reading every book that exists lol.
We are close to that. Projects like Amazon Polly or Google Text-to-Speech AI will probably be integrated and will work seamlessly (if you pay for a monthly subscription of course). There are also a million AI based projects that try to do the same to varying degrees of success.
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I am not visually impaired but I have found audiobooks or even tts for epubs to be very helpful when I have a migraine and just cannot use my eyes to read.
