Blind woman petitions for equal book access
Wants B.C. to fund online library service
A woman who is legally blind has launched a petition to try to get the provincial government to fund an online audio book library she will no longer have access to at the end of this month.
Taeshim Youn, 31, has collected 100 signatures at change.org to try to maintain access for her and other print-disabled British Columbians to a collection of 540,000 audio books at the Centre for Equitable Library Access.
That includes The Books of Pellinor fantasy series she’s listening to, her form of literary entertainment since she lost her sight after being paralyzed by an autoimmune disorder in 2006.
“I usually listen to it at night and sometimes during the day,” said Youn. “I’m bed-bound and I don’t go out as much. And when I do, I get around by wheelchair.”
Listening to books read by professional narrators is “is like watching a good movie, but better because there’s so much to it.”
Youn also wrote a letter to her Port Moody MLA, the NDP’s Rick Glumac, urging him to ensure B.C. funds the national service that all provinces, except for B.C., Manitoba and Nunavut, pay for.
“You, as part of my B.C. government, have a responsibility to fund library services for people with sight loss, just like you do for sighted citizens,” she says in her letter.
“Someone has to speak up,” said Youn by phone. “I’m hoping this will help.”
CELA was formed as a non-profit, publicly funded organization in 2014 to provide the books, magazines and newspapers the Canadian National Institute for the Blind had for years provided by licence to public libraries.
CNIB gave up control of the library because it was more appropriate for the government as opposed to a charity to be providing an audio library for the print disabled, said CELA executive director Michael Ciccone.
Almost all provincial and territorial governments agreed to fund the library, but in B.C. the support came instead from public libraries. In B.C., 17 libraries in heavily populated parts of the province pay for CELA, providing access to 80 per cent of the population, said Ciccone.
CNIB had agreed to pay for access for the users in the remaining 20 per cent of the province until public funding could be secured. There are about 2,500 users of the service, he said.
The bridge funding for the service expires at the end of this month, leaving about 240 users, including Youn, without access to CELA. The library in Port Moody, where she lives, is one of the libraries that doesn’t fund CELA.
Ciccone said CELA is in talks with the provincial education ministry and is hopeful it will be funded before the end of January.
But the education ministry said in a statement the province already funds a competing audio library called the National Network for Equitable Library Services, available through every public library in B.C.
Annual funding for NNELS in B.C. is $115,000, it said. Ciccone said it’s requesting $132,000 a year to fund CELA.
NNELS, formed in 2014 through the B.C. Libraries Co-operative, has 30,000 titles.
Former NNELS executive director Ben Hyman said print-disabled citizens, including those with vision disabilities, dyslexia or difficulties holding books, are better served by the two services because it offers them choice.
The NNELS collection is growing and will attempt to obtain special-order books, said Hyman. He also said NNELS, which is funded by eight provinces (excluding Ontario and Quebec) has a different approach to its collection, choosing not to pay for “big-batch licensing deals” as CELA does.
He said NNELS is run through a “different philosophy,” which will enable it to build a sustainable collection that will be broadly available to what’s expected to be a growing proportion of print-disabled users.