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.
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.
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modulux
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •André Polykanine
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •Jeffrey D. Stark
in reply to André Polykanine • • •André Polykanine
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •Jeffrey D. Stark
in reply to André Polykanine • • •André Polykanine
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •Jeffrey D. Stark
in reply to André Polykanine • • •André Polykanine
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •1. You take an apple. Your brain has nothing to process, except for mapping the object in your hand to the word it has for it.
2. You see an image of an apple. In this case, the brain must process a two-dimensional image, map it to the object from p. 1 and build the full picture (smell, taste, texture and so on). Note, you see the shape and the color of the object.
3. You hear the word "apple" or "an apple". this time, your brain must process the word (a sound wave, basically) and build the full picture, this time including color, shape and other visual characteristics that are missing (because it's only a spoken word).
and 4. You *read* the word "apple". This time you basically decipher symbols, be it lines and squiggles seen by your eyes or Braille dots again seen by your eyes (which is harmful to the sight) or touched by your fingers. This time the brain has to do even more work: first process the lines and squiggles or Braille dots to find the correct word, then process the word, then build the picture (here it all goes a bit differently, for sighted people it would be a visual one, for us, blind from birth, it would be a tactile one), and then to map this picture on your knowledge about the object.
So, what I want to say, all of those activities are done with different areas of your brain. that's why listening is not reading, watching is not reading, but Braille is reading — it's the same act of deciphering totally random symbols having nothing to do with the actual object.
Matt Campbell reshared this.
Jeffrey D. Stark
in reply to André Polykanine • • •I agree about the value of braille for kids and literacy... but we will have to differ in our view of adults and reading/audio
André Polykanine
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •Holger Fiallo
in reply to André Polykanine • • •André Polykanine
in reply to Holger Fiallo • • •Holger Fiallo
in reply to André Polykanine • • •LeonianUniverse
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •Jonathan Mosen
in reply to LeonianUniverse • • •I agree with you, sometimes reading a book in Braille is vastly superior because the sounds and mental pictures you create are superior.
And yes, I’ve given hundreds of public speeches, read scripts for radio, I was live on-air when the first Gulf War broke out. Because I was a Braille reader, I was able to stay on the air and present the breaking coverage. I wouldn’t have been able to do most of the things I have done in my career without Braille, let alone create so many priceless memories with my children and granddaughter.
LeonianUniverse
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •Jonathan Mosen
in reply to LeonianUniverse • • •LeonianUniverse
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •modulux
in reply to LeonianUniverse • • •Marek Macko reshared this.
Sean Randall
in reply to modulux • • •@modulux @glaroc When I listen to my computer reading a summary of a chart at work, I hear data.
When I hear that same voice reading me communication between ground control and a spaceship, I hear the voices filtered through radios and the roar of the ship's engines. if I'm listening to a passage on a sailing vessel, I hear the creek of wood, the billow of sailcloth. And if I'm reading media I already now, like star Trek, even though I know it's still text-to-speech, in my head, it's the actor's voices.
It's all about context, and I'm pretty sure if you scanned my brain whilst I was listening to a synthetic reading of a novel, different parts of it would be doing things than for using that same text-to-speech system to listen to an email.
Kara Goldfinch
in reply to modulux • • •As I've said before, I love Braille, but sadly because of various things it's not practical for me, which annoys me.
modulux
in reply to Kara Goldfinch • • •Jonathan Mosen
Unknown parent • • •@weirdwriter @jscholes Thanks for your thoughts. Reading raised print is definitely a useful skill, and I agree that raised print, unlike audio, is reading. Again, I also think audio is a valid way of absorbing and conveying information. But raised print is not a substitute for Braille. History teaches us this. If you have the inclination, you might look at my keynote address written to the International Council on English Braille to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the invention of the Braille code. mosen.org/iceb2024/
For most of history, blind people weren’t even considered worthy of being educated at all. Despite this, there had been successful blind people in a wide range of disciplines. Some people are so talented, they’ll succeed no matter what. When the first school for the blind was established in Paris, it was naturally assumed that blind people should read the way everyone else did, using print. So laborious ways were devised of creating raised print books. They were incredibly bulky, but most important, even those who mastered the technique were slow readers. Initially at least, it was also not possible for a blind person to write using this method, and read back what they had written. What is little known is that Louis Braille got this problem fixed too, when he invented the system of representing print as dots. This system has made possible the dot matrix printer, today’s digital camera, and screens. Yet another source of blind pride for me.
When Louis Braille devised his system, it was met with enthusiasm by his blind peers, but huge resistance by some sighted people who didn’t like it because it wasn’t “normal”. At the height of the backlash, the Braille code was actually banned, and Braille books were burned.
In the end, even the principal of the school for the blind in Paris had to back down after a public demonstration at which blind kids were reading Braille, which had now become an underground code and therefore even more attractive, way faster than anyone had ever read raised print. The lesson was that the average blind person could read Braille far faster, with greater proficiency, than they could read raised print. Plus, they had the slate and stylus for effectively taking notes. The Braille code is a wonderful example of self-determination. Blind people solving our own problems, doing it our way and coming up with superior alternative techniques.
Even though the outcomes spoke for themselves, the United States went through what is now known as the “War of the Dots”, where sighted people in powerful positions opposed Braille despite the overwhelming evidence of its efficacy. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that the US signed onto a code for the English speaking world.
Then war on Braille was declared all over again when mainstreaming became the norm, so Braille production required more resourcing, then talking computers came along and were thought by some to be a substitute. You only need look at the quality of some of the spelling coming from many blind people on email lists to know the truth of that one.
The problem we have in this thread is that it has exposed a shortcoming I didn’t touch on in my original post, and should have. Too many people who become fully blind later in life are undersold the value of Braille, and not given an opportunity to learn it. I’ve been deeply touched to read the account of @dhamlinmusic, who became blind in the most horrible circumstances imaginable, and fought for his right to read Braille. He now benefits from his victory in many ways including the relationship with his child, who he can read to.
I have fought for the rights of blind people in many ways every day of my adult life, and I would never blame or shame anyone for being deprived of resources. That is not their fault and it is not your fault. I do, however, unequivocally call out those agencies, often led by sighted people and staffed in the main by sighted people, who downplay the value of Braille as a tool for many blind adults with potentially years ahead of them of productivity and employability.
Those who have talent and are struggling to have that talent recognised or monetised may have had less of a struggle if they were equipped with Braille skills. Again, that is the fault of the system, not the individual. And it annoys me when people blame blind individuals who are in fact the victims of a system that failed them.
James Scholes
in reply to Jonathan Mosen • • •Thank you for sharing your perspective. As the author of the post I assume is being referenced, I'd like to provide some context:
Recently, I've encountered several elitist viewpoints on this subject, using phrases like quote "the proper way" unquote to consume literature. I strongly disagree with any implication that there are right and wrong ways to educate and entertain oneself through books.
However, I acknowledge that my post could have made its scope clearer, and you're not the only one to mention how this view is weaponized in educational settings. Regardless of the reasons, making counterproductive and lazy decisions on behalf of disabled students is unacceptable.
I hold certain educators and educational systems responsible for the fact that blind and low-vision students too often leave school with subpar literacy levels. While they may justify their approaches with certain rhetoric, it's their actions and agendas that are at fault—whether rooted in ignorance, misguided attempts to compensate for lack of funding, or other reasons. However, the rhetoric itself shouldn't be automatically blamed for how people choose to interpret and misuse it.
As for the differences in brain activity between different consumption methods, some studies suggest that in adults, listening and reading by sight or touch aren't as different as commonly thought. I notice you've received responses stating the opposite, but I don't have the expertise to state one position over another.
Semantics aside, I think we can agree that consuming material that educates and uplifts is more important than ever, regardless of how people choose to do so.
Jonathan Mosen
in reply to James Scholes • • •