terminal and life threatening illness. My collection of specially commissioned short
stories The Spell Singer and other Stories (1991) presents positive images of a wide range
of children for whom learning and even living is a daily battle.
Non-Print BooksReading with eyes, ears, hands and fingers is a concept which is comparatively new to
parents and some teachers. For some years provision has been made for blind people to
listen to taped books, but this often required the use of special equipment which was
not portable. Therefore listening to, or reading a book was limited to a specific
geographic space, which meant that, unlike the printed word, the sound book was not
fully portable. The developments in small personal tape and disc players, and the
market demands for books on sound tape, has now reached most corners of the world
and for a child who is blind this is one of the few ways of enjoying the printed word.
Sound is also a more accessible form of reading for children with severe print reading
difficulties and for those who cannot physically handle a printed book. The companies
producing large print now offer boxed sound editions of a number of titles either as an
alternative, or as an adjunct to large print editions.
As videotape recorders have proliferated in home and school life, another form of
‘reading’ has become accessible to children who cannot manage print and also to those
who find reading print a long and laborious task. In addition, many commercial videos
now carry a small symbol which indicates that they have been subtitled by the National
Captioning Institute, and with the use of a decoder, deaf children can watch or read a
book on film. The development of computer disk interactive (CDI) and CD-ROM is still in
its infancy, but there is potential for the presentation of literature in a way which will
assist children with reading difficulties: some books are available in print, braille, signed
language, audio tape and video tape.
The NLHC, which is located in Britain, provides a resource centre and information
service to anyone with a problem relating to children who have difficulty with reading.
While all of these developments are exciting they are also frustrating. Each new area
opens up more need, every child helped leads to another who needs assistance. There is
unfortunately a long lead time between the development of a new initiative and the take
up by schools, libraries and the general public. That lead time can be the breaking point
between the commercial release of some worthwhile and needed materials and the
burial of the same idea. In the late 1980s some experimentation was done by the Royal
College of Art on the use of holograms in the presentation of signed language in the hope
that it would be commercially viable. Unfortunately the cost of research and the needs
of the market did not coincide and although a good idea, it was not developed for
commercial publishing. The production of braille in commercially viable quantities
within standard trade editions of picture books is a technical problem which so far has
not been solved. Using signed language in printed books is viable in the USA, but in
Britain the demand is not yet great enough for companies to be interested in pursuing
the market.
The need is still there, and will remain until all children leaving school are reading to
their full potential, regardless of the medium used. Probably the most important
642 PUBLISHING FOR SPECIAL NEEDS