Hello everyone, karate here again and I thought I'd create this thread to help to describe some ways that the totally blind love to read books and novels. As you know, we rely heavily on our computers to do lots of things from working and researching right down to playing games like ruler of kings for example. However, we also use our computers to read a good many books and they take several different forms. For instance, we love audio books. These actually take a couple of different forms, both of which use the computer to obtain them. First, we have what are called digital talking book players which use a cartridge that has usually two gigabytes worth of space on them that you're able to download books and magazines from a service called nls, otherwise known as the national library service for the blind and physically handicapped. It used to be, back in the day, you had to carry around a big bulky record player that played specially designed records that had the books and magazines on them. Then, in the 80s, we moved to cassette tapes when the original talking book player was built and now today we have the digital talking book player which is a much smaller unit, that has absolutely no moving parts the buttons are rubber and they're all brailled. Next, we love to listen to what are called audio dramas. These are literally what they sound like. Books that have been dramatized with music sound effects and actors. Let me tell you one thing, if you find the right company that produces these, you're in for a real journey for the ears I can assure you of this because I've experienced it first hand. Finally as it relates to audio based materials for our entertainment, some blind people like to listen to old time radio shows. These are lots of fun too because like the audio dramas, they use lots of sounds music and actors to portray the characters in the stories that they allow us to really use our imaginations to see what's going on in a story or a scene. And finally, we also like to read text-based books as well just like the rest of our sighted counterparts. We do this using our computers and screen readers to find and download Ebooks and our screen readers read them allowed to us and this is how we too are able to read text materials like you folks do. We can also use something a book reader, or nowadays we have apps on our smart devices that will allow us to actually scan or take a picture of a printed page, and our devices will read those pages out loud to us as well. So we could take our devices with us to a restaurant and read the menu if that particular restaurant doesn't have braille menus available. Well my friends, I hope that this thread has helped shed some light on how we as the blindness community amuse ourselves with reading and I hope it helps you to understand that we're able to do everything our sighted counterparts are able to do with the right kinds of tools and training. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to hearing from you all soon with any sorts of questions that you might have. Please don't be shy, there is no such thing as a stupid question, only the one you didn't ask.

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