A short tale of international harmony

Some good people at Lenape High School, New Jersey, USA wrote to me asking if I knew whether Braille copies of She Is Not Invisible were available in America. They've chosen the book to be their One Book/One School title for 2015/2016 and wanted to make it accessible to a couple of blind/visually impaired students. The whole point of One Book/One School is to make a book available for everyone in the community to read, after all.

Sadly it seemed that there isn't a Braille edition in the US, so I thought it was worth asking the RNIB over here in the UK if they could help. They'd produced a Braille edition for publication day of She Is Not Invisible back in 2013, but I thought there might be some obstacles. I wasn't sure if UK Braille and US Braille are the same, for one thing, and for another thing Braille books are VERY expensive to make. That's the main reason why so few Braille books are produced (less than 1% of published titles) and that's a shame because it is terrible that being blind should stop you from having access to as many books as a sighted person. Yes, there are other options, and yes, not every blind person reads Braille, but when I spoke to various people when I was writing She Is Not Invisible I couldn't help but feel that some more money to make more books accessible to blind readers through Braille would be very welcome.

Fortunately for me, and for Lenape High School, the RNIB are just a truly wonderful organisation, and though their school is all the way over the ocean in another country, they made the decision to gift a Braille edition of the book to the school. (It turns out that UK and US Braille are almost identical: I'm told the differences are only when you come to write it, not read it).

The impact of this act of generosity is not just of benefit for the blind students, and to explain why, here's what Jaime Fauver, Media Specialist at Lenape High had to say when she received the book:

"It arrived yesterday and we are so excited about it! I spoke with our special education teachers and they are also excited - not only for students who are blind or near blind and read Braille but also for the other students in the MD classes (multiple disabled).  These students in this class suffer from a range of disabilities and the teachers are going to use this as an opportunity to discuss differences and unique challenges.  When we took the book to the classroom today, all of the students were fascinated and intrigued.  Most of the school materials for our partially/fully blind students are audio; however they know how to read Braille (we just didn't have the resources). The teachers are going to spend the last week of school turning this into a lesson about diversity and acceptance and how interesting and exciting each of the students' unique traits are!"


Diversity and acceptance. What better goals could we aim for?

Finally, the Photography II students at the school made a range of posters to advertise the book around the school, and put together this short video to showcase their work. It's worth looking at: there are some great interpretations in there, and some cover designers in the making, I think.

Finally, I want to say a massive thank you to Cathy Wright, Librarian at New College, Worcester for her ongoing advice when I don't know something about the unsighted world, to Lenape High for doing such good work with the book, and to the RNIB for their wonderful act of kindness.

Read for RNIB

Less than 1% of books are published in Braille. No more than 7% of books are published in some format which makes them accessible to blind or visually impaired readers; formats such as audiobooks, Daisy readers, large or giant print, and even if a book appears in one of these formats; it may be months after the publication of the traditional format or e-book version.

Yes, it is possible for e-readers to 'speak' a digital copy of a book to the blind, but text-to-speech systems typically offer an unrealistic electronic voice. If you think you'd wouldn't mind having a full-length book read to you by something like that, you should try five minutes of it to see...

I am therefore extremely proud that my newly published book, She Is Not Invisible, is available in a wide range of accessible formats, and from day one of its life.

The book is about a 16-year-old girl whose father is a writer. He's a writer obsessed with the question of coincidences, and when he goes missing, Laureth decides to follow clues left behind in his notebook to try to find him. This is somewhat harder than it would be for most 16-year-olds, because Laureth has been blind from birth. That’s what made me convinced the book should be published in accessible formats from the start, and I’m delighted that my publisher, Orion, agreed.

The book is part of RNIB’s Read for RNIB Day, and is one of six titles that have blind protagonists which have been chosen as suggested books for reading groups to read, in the Reading Group Challenge. This is a wonderful scheme aimed at raising money for the RNIB so they can continue their work of enabling the blind to have a better reading experience. The mere existence of certain charities in our society has always appalled me. The RNLI, the RNIB: aren't these services which any wealthy, civilised country ought to provide from central government? But they don't, so in the meantime, it's up to the rest of us to fund them, and help blind and VI people have an equal share in our country's culture.

It was, of course, an enormous challenge to write a book with a blind protagonist, not least because I chose to write from her point of view, in the first person. I had no idea just how great the challenge was until I started my research. Over the last two years I've made a series of trips to New College, Worcester, where I spoke at length with blind and VI students. Every single one of them was open, honest, generous and patient with me, and slowly, I began to get a little understanding of what life is like for them. How it is different, of course, but just as importantly, how it is the same. I cannot begin to pretend I know what it's like to be blind from birth, as Laureth is in the book. How could you ever forget what colour is, to give just one example? If I have achieved anything at all in this book, however, it's thanks to the help I received from the students there. I literally could not have written this book without them. It is their book, and I am grateful beyond words for the kindness they showed me.

Here's a short film made the RNIB about the day I went back to New College, with a finished copy of the book in my hands. And yes, I was really nervous.