Visual Impairment and Access to Books

Meet the Planets, by Caryl Hart (Bloomsbury), a page magnifier and a Kindle at 12 text size, The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman (Penguin Random House).

Over the last four years, I have had to expand my knowledge of how books, reading and publishing works, and the reason for this has not been for a career move or a project for work, but because I became a mother. I have found so much overlap between the skills I’ve developed as a mother and parent and those I’ve been nurturing in my career in children's book publishing for all these years, and I’d love to use my voice to add to the positive narrative of being a working mother that I see emerging.

As it turns out, as these things often do, the type of mother I have become is the mother of a special needs child. My little one is visually impaired, and so the last 4 years have been a journey of accepting, researching and learning about that world. Not only the medical side of things, but also opening my mind to the realities of the day-to-day life of someone for whom vision isn’t their primary sense. 

This week’s challenge has been sourcing books. Despite it seeming to be a contrary statement, my visually impaired little one is a voracious reader, just like me! They always have been, from the time they could recognise letters during first lockdown, we spent hours walking down our road so they could read all the number plates. My other little, who we often refer to as the 'Eye of Sauron' because they see everything and at all times, does not like books nearly as much.

Their love of reading has medical side-effects like eye strain and headaches, so we overcome this by rationing out time reading, which feels completely unnatural but it is necessary. The other side-effect is accessibility. They are reading pretty much independently already (which, parent brag warning, is absolutely incredible anyway, but especially given how challenging it is for them to read from a physical standpoint), but as they start to read more and want more complicated books, the text begins to get smaller which means something they love becomes increasingly inaccessible, just as they are just getting into the swing of being a lover of books and stories.

There are several paths forward.

Giant Print Books

There are a few options for this and we will be doing this in part, but for a big reader this becomes a storage problem because these books are huge! Which might seem like an obvious statement, given the nature of text and pictures being larger, but when I first saw these, I was blown away with just how large they are, especially in perspective with a little four-year-old sat behind them!

From an editorial point of view, due to the large font size, sometimes sentences are split over a page which frankly makes my brain itch but the approach to these books isn’t what I’ve learnt from working in children’s publishing  – these books aren’t visual or primarily about the aesthetics, these are tools to get a story across in an accessible way. Honestly, when you think about what books are fundamentally, their only function is to tell a story (and hopefully inspire a lifelong love of reading), and that’s what these books do.

Another issue with these books is what to do with them after the little one has outgrown that book. These aren’t books you can donate to charity shops or offer second-hand, as they are so specific the market for them is very small. 

eBooks

I spent hours downloading and looking at children’s picture book ebooks from various publishers. Some I downloaded had an amazing feature where you could double tap on the text and it isolated and zoomed in on the text, which is perfect. It is also a great feature for children who are learning to read too, so they can focus on the text without distraction. But not every ebook has this. 

Sometimes the text doesn’t contrast enough from the background colour (this is a common problem across all books), so it wouldn’t matter how large the text could be made.

Some ebooks are just PDFs, so although you can zoom in to make the text larger, it’s a bit (a lot) of a faff, especially for little hands just learning how to navigate tablets. 

I think ebooks will eventually become the solution but at the moment, digital reading just isn’t appealing to them. It’s really an argument for the importance of physical books, as there’s just a feeling of reading physical books that’s different from digital!

Library

My normal instinct to solve the problem of a voracious reader (storage versus giving them an ample supply of new stories to delve into) would be the library, and indeed this is what I’ve been doing to add some variety, when my huge library of children’s books from working on them for over a decade fell short, which inexplicably it has done. So I asked if they had large print books for children or something that was already set up so we could order in large print books for them. They did not, so I left with a promise that they’d look into options. I will be following up. There are other visually impaired children in my area that perhaps might want access to books too. This seems like an uphill battle against funding and other things, but I will try – I hate the idea that my little one will lose access to the library in this way.

I wonder if I can donate the giant print books to the library once they’ve been outgrown?

I think I will end up using a combination of all these pathways, but what this has done is highlight to me the importance of making books accessible, and the difficulty in finding out how to source books like this is – if it is difficult for someone who has worked in children's publishing for over a decade, it must be impossible for someone who hasn't. Does anyone else who has worked in publishing have experience making visually impaired books?