If I had a dollar for every time someone has said, “But you’re not actually reading, you’re listening to someone reading to you,” I would be a lot richer than I am right now. The statement is usually delivered casually, sometimes with genuine curiosity, sometimes with quiet judgement. Either way, it carries an assumption: that reading only counts if it looks a certain way.
Last week, I wrote about the first time my father brought me a storybook that came with a cassette tape. That small combination of paper and plastic opened up a world I hadn’t known was available to me. For the first time, I could experience a story independently, at my own pace, without waiting for someone else to read it aloud. That moment didn’t just change how I consumed books; it reshaped my understanding of what access could look like.
The truth is, when you’re blind or visually impaired, reading looks different. Yet people often try to flatten that difference into a choice: Braille or audiobooks, as if one must replace the other, as though there’s a hierarchy and we’re expected to justify whichever option we choose.
In reality, most blind and visually impaired people don’t live in that binary. We move between formats, sometimes in the same day, depending on what we’re reading and why.
Braille offers direct contact with language. It is, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of print in our world. Spelling, punctuation, and layout are easier to absorb through touch than through audio alone. For education, language development, and certain kinds of focus, Braille plays an essential role. It isn’t just about access to content; it’s about literacy in its most tangible form.
At the same time, Braille isn’t always practical. Physical space, cost, availability, and even physical fatigue all play a role. A single novel can span multiple volumes. Not every title is produced in Braille, and not every blind person has had the opportunity to learn it fluently. Some lose sensitivity in their hands over time. Others come to blindness later in life and find Braille more difficult to master.
When the refreshable Braille displays hit the market, the need for storage was negated, as Braille became paperless. Now, we can connect our Braille displays to our phones, computer or any smart device and have Braille at our fingertips. However, for the average blind and visually impaired person, these displays are difficult to afford.
Despite this, the absence of Braille is often framed as a personal failure or dismissed entirely under the assumption that audio technology has made it obsolete. Both perspectives miss the point. Accessibility isn’t about forcing everyone into the same method of reading.
Audiobooks, meanwhile, deserve far more credit than they’re often given. Listening is not a shortcut, and it is certainly not passive. Audiobooks require focus, comprehension, memory, and interpretation, the same cognitive skills involved in reading print or Braille. In many cases, audio allows blind readers to access material more efficiently, particularly when dealing with large volumes of text, time-sensitive information, or content that simply isn’t available in Braille.
Audio also offers freedom. It allows reading while commuting, cooking, resting tired hands, or managing chronic pain and fatigue. It makes it possible to read in real-world conditions, rather than idealised ones. For many of us, audiobooks aren’t a replacement for literacy; they’re what make consistent reading possible at all.
Braille and audiobooks are not competing for relevance. They work best when they coexist. One supports deep structural understanding of language; the other expands access, speed, and flexibility. Together, they reflect how blind and visually impaired people actually read: adaptively, strategically, and with intention.
What’s often missing from these conversations is the recognition that flexibility is literacy. The ability to choose the format that best fits a moment, a task, or a body isn’t a compromise. It is a skill. Blind and visually impaired readers learn early how to navigate information strategically, switching between Braille, audio, and other accessible formats not out of convenience, but out of necessity. That adaptability is not a lesser form of reading; it’s a sophisticated one, shaped by access, intention, and lived reality.
The real problem isn’t how we read. It’s the persistent need to defend our reading at all. When someone says, “You’re not really reading,” what they’re often revealing is an inability to imagine literacy outside their own experience. But reading has never been a single act. It’s a relationship with language and for us, that relationship is richer, not poorer, because it takes more than one form.
