Large print picture books from CustomEyes Books

Large print editions from CustomEyes of ‘You Choose, Your Adventure’ World Book Day title, by Nick Sharatt and Pippa Goodhart, ‘Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape’, by Dermot O’Leary and ‘Aliens Love Underpants’ by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort

I had been researching about large print books for months, as I always knew that it was inevitable that my little one would need them, but I was happy to push it off into the future; why face an uncomfortable reality until you absolutely have to do so?

But the time was looming and as they took a huge step forward in their reading, asking to read alone more and more, I knew it was time.

For my little one, it isn’t that they can’t see smaller or regular-sized print sometimes, because on a good day, they can. But that the effort to see the small print very quickly causes eye-strain and headaches. I imagine that similarly quickly their love of reading might diminish if it is always associated with pain and discomfort.

So it was time to put my desperate scramble to find large print resources into action.
First up: Custom Eyes from Guide Dogs UK.

CustomEyes is such a brilliant and amazing service for accessible books. You can customise so much to fit whatever the need is absolute perfection in accessibility terms. It is something that can be used for a number accessibilities needs – if certain fonts are easier to read, then you can select those; if you need another paper colour, then you can choose that.

I can not say enough good things about this service, and I will continue to shout-out about it to everyone I know in publishing, in the hope that this might open up doors to get this wonderful charity access to as many book files as possible.

This is my experience with CustomEyes so far, I will definitely continue buying from here in the future.

My sister wanted to buy some for the little one’s birthday, so I had a look on Amazon for some books little one would enjoy reading. I found some and added the ISBN into the search bar on the Custom Eyes website.

I couldn’t find the books I had chosen.

OK, I thought. The ones I had chosen were published in the last 18 months or so. Perhaps these books were in the pipeline, I thought hopefully.

So I changed tact. I filtered for picture books, age 3-5 on the CustomEyes website. I looked through and chose three. Although I filtered by age and format, it did throw in a few books that weren’t appropriate for Monty’s age and reading ability. A few were chapter books that had a few pictures in it - so in the future, I will just do my own research on the book before just clicking and buying.

The books arrived and are great, though I do think i made a mistake getting yellow paper on these, as Monty really doesn’t seem to like it… even though he reads from yellow paper at nursery. Everything is trial and error, so we’ll learn and move on.

Using, learning and dealing with CustomEyes has been amazing, and I can’t help but see the potential in this service - what if it it was able to offer a large print or customised version of every available book, to make books truly accessible and enjoyable for all?

To do that, I want to do my small part in building awareness for this truly exceptional and necessary service within the publishing industry, with the hope that this will give this charity more access, and easier access to the files for these books.

Step by step, I’ll get there.

If you work in publishing, let’s chat about CustomEyes, large print picture books and making books accessible for all!