THE SPOKEN WORD
A new community service project is ensuring that schoolbooks are more accessible to students with visual and reading impairments BY MUNA AL-ALUL
Online
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his year, the school’s Community Service cocurricular introduced audio book recording to its range of activities. The idea to record audio books, suggested by Learning Center faculty member Tatyana Mansour, was born out of necessity. A number of students at King’s have visual impairments or trouble reading, which results in the need for audio rather than text books. However, several books in the curriculum are not available as audio books. “I was shocked that some people at King’s need that kind of help,” says Reema Zubaidi ’21 who worked on recording audio books over the course of two semesters. “But one of the best things about King’s is the community and how we help each other. I like the collaboration of us students working on it. Being part of that experience reminds
us that we should appreciate the resources we have but take for granted.” During the activity, groups of students — using simple recording tools such as mobile phones and microphones borrowed from the library — sit around a table and read the book aloud. To date, students have recorded Tanya Ronder’s adaptation of Shahid Nadeem’s play Dara, an English-language book studied in the 10th grade and the Arabic book Al Ragheef by Tawfiq Yousef Awwad. “It was fun sitting and recording Dara as if we are real actors of the theater,” says Donggyu Kim ’21. “I was happy that I could help people understand the story through my reading.” The students soon learned, however, that the process of creating the audio book was more challenging than it seemed. Learning as they went along, repetition was inevitable, and often multiple recordings of the same
sections by different students were made in order to give better options in terms of quality and cadence to Mansour, who would edit and compile the finished product. “I had to learn a lot to do this,” says Zubaidi. “First, my voice was too loud or too low, or too far from the mic. You need to read perfectly so you don’t confuse the listener. I repeated a lot. You can’t make any mistakes because you know someone is depending on us for this, so we want to give our best.” The experience of audio book recording made Ibrahim Al Aboosi ’20 realize how much of a deficiency there is in audio books, particularly in Arabic. “I hope in the future there is a whole co-curricular dedicated to audio book recording,” says Al Aboosi, “because we didn’t have much time to work on it, just one day a week. If we had more time, we could develop a database of audio books for anyone, especially Arabic speakers, to use.” SPRING 2020
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