Books For Visually Impaired
Visually impaired people are constantly experiencing challenges in their daily life. Reading is one of the challenges. While people who have not lost their sight completely can utilise numerous accessories to help them see and read, completely blind people are left with less options, among them Braille books and audio – talking books.
There are couple of options how the people who are partially blind and did not loose their sight completely can effectively read. Books with larger print over sixteen point are available today. Most people, even those with sight not impaired prefer larger print. Proper line height is also important. With recent development and increasing popularity of ebooks and digital books things are even easier. Almost any digitally produced book has an option for font scaling. This way the fonts can be made as big as a person reading needs them to be for comfortable reading. Obviously there are also long term proven ways that can help people with impaired vision to read comfortably. The first thing that comes to mind are eye glasses and eye lenses. Most of the people use those but there are also other options like magnifying glass for reading and even full page magnifiers for reading books available.
Completely blind people are presented with less options but can still enjoy reading in full. Braille is the obvious choice. It was invented by a blind Frenchman Louis Braille in 1825. It is arranged in six dots in two columns with three dots in each column. Dots can be raised and they make up to sixty-four combinations for letters. Braille system enabled huge literacy spike among completely blind people in the last century and many books, new and classics are today transcribed to Braille system. With technology another great option emerged to help blind people read books. Audio and talking books are available today and with the spread of the Internet can be easily downloaded unlike earlier when only audio cassettes and records were available. Now many books, best sellers and magazines are available in audio format and with a new way of life audio books are popular even among people who are not visually impaired but do not have the time to read books.
As we can see there are couple of options for visually impaired people, completely blind and those who did not loose their sight completely to enjoy reading books. Libraries are constantly adding books transcribed to Braille along with audio – talking books to their bookshelves enabling easy access to books for visually impaired people. With the help of the latest technology and the Internet the amount of reading material in the audio format that is easily accessible will even increase. Certainly good news for visually impaired people.