What we do

We have a free online library for visually impaired readers. You can join our library now and start accessing our books straight away. We are also running a Big Lottery project to encourage school children to be Seeing Ear school librarians.

Our library

Our library is available to people who are unable to enjoy reading a book because they are blind, visually impaired, have print blindness due to dyslexia or are physically impaired.

All our books are available in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, plain text and Braille. The books in Microsoft Word format are marked up in order to make it as easy as possible to customise the book to suit the way you want to read them.

We continue to add books to our library all the time, covering every subject. Our Seeing Ear school librarians can request the books they want, but if you have a suggestion you are welcome to contact us.

School librarian project

Our second Lottery-funded project ran from April 2014 to April 2017. Its aim was to give visually impaired school children the opportunity to become “Seeing Ear school librarians”. These school librarians can request books from us that they or their friends need to have transcribed into an electronic format.

Books for All project

From 2010 to 2013 we worked with CALL Scotland on the Lottery-funded Books for All project. The project helped schools by creating an online library where they could share books that they had already converted into an electronic format. This helped to avoid the duplication of effort, where previously the same book might have been transcribed in many schools. We also ran training courses on book transcription for school staff, and at the same time we trained our own volunteers who succeeded in adding a further 1,500 popular books to our online library.