ABLE’s audio books program serves nearly 7,000 patrons of the Wisconsin Talking Book and Braille Library and over 550,000 individuals throughout the whole country. Since 2015, ABLE has been recording audio books in our own state-of-the-art Sound Center with a quality that meets the digital recording standards of the National Library Service for the Blind and Printed Disabled (NLS). In partnership with the NLS and the Wisconsin Talking Book and Braille Library, ABLE’s volunteer readers record a wide variety of books for both children and adults, with an emphasis on Wisconsin authors. Volunteer narrators, who undergo significant training, read aloud in the ABLE Sound Center while staff members edit the books they are reading on the spot.
The fiction and nonfiction audiobooks that ABLE produces are a lifeline for our recipients, providing books that would not otherwise be available to the blindness community.
Among the Wisconsin authors whose books we have recorded are Zola Gale of Portage, Margot Peters from Wausau, Meg Jones and Victoria Houston of Rhinelander, and Louis Clark from the Oneida Reservation. Without ABLE, audiobook patrons would not have access to books by these—and other—Wisconsin authors.
On the next page, we are excited to share the news of one book, Beneath the Flames…