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Recently while catching up on posts, I came across a thread stating that it was a fact that listening to an audiobook counts as reading. The post was couched in a highly dogmatic way which suggested there wasn’t much room for debate, so I chose not to contribute.
However, having taken a day to think about it, I’m concerned about leaving this view unchallenged because I genuinely believe that it is potentially harmful to the education, and therefore the economic prospects, of young blind people.
The first point I want to make is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying a great audiobook. A good narrator can make a book come to life. I don’t believe an audiobook is inferior. Although I don’t listen to many audiobooks anymore just as a matter of choice, I do opt for an audiobook when someone is reading their own autobiography. That’s because rather than read the book, I would rather listen to someone reading their own book to me.
But when I choose to listen to an audiobook, I am no more reading the book than my grandchild is reading it when I read a book to her. She is being entertained, in some cases she is gaining valuable knowledge, but she is not reading it, she is being read to. There is benefit in this. It could be enhancing her aural language skills.
You may be thinking that this is all pointless semantics. But the reason I’m raising it is that the “audiobooks are reading” argument has been used to deprive blind kids of true literacy. To me, true literacy is the ability to write something down and read it back. Braille is the only viable means of true literacy a blind person has. For all the good that technology has done, when talking computers came on the scene and audiobooks became more abundant, some teachers and more than a few public policy practitioner decided that these developments meant that we didn’t need to teach blind kids to read anymore. It was a means of short-changing blind kids, of not allocating the necessary funding and resources to give them a good start in life. It was disgraceful. No parent of a sighted child would tolerate being told that their kid didn’t need to read because they could just listen to audio instead.
The result was that many people who had so much to offer the world were deprived of the right to read. It is often these professionals and policy makers who want blind people to believe that listening is the same as reading.
These kids who missed out on the opportunity to read became adults with fewer employment prospects. We know that the unemployment rate of Braille readers is far closer to the unemployment rate of the population as a whole, compared with those blind people who haven’t had the opportunity to read Braille. And in a sad irony, these kids, some of whom grew up to be parents, were not given the tools to read bedtime stories to their kids when they eventually became parents. Putting on an audiobook for a child is nothing like the personal bonding that comes from a parent reading a story to a child.
Some of those kids who missed out on literacy took the brave step of learning Braille as an adult, but they know they will find it difficult to achieve the same speed they would have if they had learned Braille as a child. It is a tragedy.
While there has been a recovery, this sort of story is not yet completely in the past. It is still happening to some kids today.
Enjoy those audiobooks. I certainly do. But let’s also ensure that every blind child has the right to read by not playing into the narrative that listening to a book read by someone else is the same as reading one yourself.