Audiobooks & Accessibility

Hello my dear readers,

Recording Studio

I am really excited to share my latest author adventure: working with an amazing group of voice actors to create audiobook versions of my ebooks! By the end of this year, you should be able to read and listen to my work as audiobooks, paperbacks, and ebooks. Naturally, I’m excited partly because I hope that this will open my content up to a new market audience. But it goes beyond that. By adding audiobooks to my repertoire, my content will be more accessible and inclusive to all.

Accessibility is something I think about a lot. As so many writers do, I have another full-time job in the public education sector. Specifically, I work as an Instructional Designer and Technologist, which means that I work in online learning and provide training to educators for delivering their instructional content at a distance. You can imagine how the demand for instructional designers has magnified over the past year!

Accessibility, put simply, is hugely important to instructional designers. At its core, this is because learning is for everyone. Period. Ensuring that your content is accessible to students with disabilities is critical not only because it’s the LAW, but also because it will make your instruction better when done mindfully. When you design for those in the margins, everyone benefits. I’ll give you one of the same examples I use in my training: how many of you have ever used the captions on a movie to better understand what was happening, even if you’re not hard of hearing? Or how many times have you been sitting somewhere in public, watching a YouTube video on mute with the captions on? Captions may be designed for those who cannot hear, but so many others benefit from their use.

The same principle applies to audiobooks. And that’s because reading is for everyone. Maybe some think of audiobooks as serving a small portion of the population, and thus, a small segment of the market. And maybe I won’t earn back much, if any, of the money I’m investing in the process. But putting in the time and money to add an accessible option is something I’m excited about, and I can’t wait to share the finished products with all of you!

And to those of you who asked me about the audiobook versions that started this whole train of thought: thank you! I’m listening!