Just for now we ll look at the last point first. Let s look for a moment at a few statistics. Braille production is slow. It has speeded up a lot in the last few years, but we ve only moved from years to months, it is still far from fast. All the producers are heavily over stretched in production terms so books can sit around for months waiting to be transcribed even after they ve passed the hurdle of selection.
Tape production is also slow.
Most of the providers are charities and depend on volunteers to read the books. Issues such as accent of the on tape reader and of the book have to be addressed. Audio reading is different from reading in print and Braille because someone, the on tape reader, intervenes between book reader and book, and these issues need careful attention. In this country, commercial tape production has gone down the route of producing abridged versions of books, so these are not suitable for anyone who requires the full text. Large print, like Braille and audio has issues about obtaining rights to reproduce books, and the producers are operating in a commercial market and perceive sales of large print to be relatively small and are therefore they are unwilling to take chances on titles which they think may not sell.