Launched by Dubai’s Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Dubai Audio Library seeks to help the 7 million visually impaired people in the Arab world.
It’s an initiative, reports Nasher News,
undertaken by the RTA in collaboration with the website Bookshare.org.
The Library is a volunteering platform for supporting seven million visually-challenged Arabs. The Bookshare.org website has 600,000 books in English, but only 300 Arabic books. RTA is seeking to increase the number of Arabic audio books on the website to 300,000.
RTA plans to work with Arab publishing houses to acquire Arabic language content .
Selected books, writes Nasher News,
will be on the topics of positive ideas, confidence building, determination in coping with life challenges, and enhancing imagination.
It’s not clear from this report if that latter topic embraces general fiction.
Nor is it clear how the library will be made available to those who need it most.
The move comes at a time when an unprecedented number of Arabic language audiobooks are available in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region through commercial operations like Dahd, Booklava, Kitab Sawti and Storytel.
The big challenge for the visually-impaired will be discovering and navigating these sites to find the content they want. Visual impairment can range from dyslexia to blindness. Responsive smartspeakers may be the answer to the navigation problem in the not too distant future.
Via Nasher News.
