NOTICE
unique service to blind and visually-impaired Kansas residents. The Audio-Reader Network broadcasts readings of books, magazines and newspapers across the state. After going through a short audition, volunteers are assigned a weekly reading. Carole Smith and Nancy Colyer both read "Newspapers from Central and Western Kansas" every Friday at 2 p.m.
Audio-Reader is run out of the east wing of the Kansas Public Radio building on the University of Kansas campus. It will enter its 37th year of operation on October 7—the second oldest program of its kind in the United States. It serves about 6,000 residents of Kansas and Western Missouri. The service depends heavily on volunteers, who do the majority of reading for the station.
Jennifer Nigro, volunteer coordinator, says about 350 volunteers contribute their time to Audio-Reader. Most of the volunteers come from the Lawrence area and several drive in every week from Topeka, or the Karner
peka or the Kansas
City area. Some volunteers are even able to read from their homes.
When volunteers start working at the station, they first go through an orientation and are required to take a 100-word
pronunciation test and record a section of reading from some of Audio-Reader's materials.
There are a wide variety of magazines read, covering subjects from cooking to politics to pornography. Books are diverse as well,and many are read by special request of the listeners.
Nigro says most volunteers read books in one-hour segments, and that many volunteers can get through approximately 30 pages in an hour. Large books, however, take much longer to read. A volunteer reading Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek, which is about 700 pages, will need more than a year to read the book from cover to cover.
"When I read,I try and think about who is listening and how important it might be to them."
ern Kansas" includes newspapers as large as the Emporia Gazette and those as small as the Clay Center Dispatch. When Smith and Colyer arrive each week, they start by looking through the papers they are going to read and marking which stories they want to broadcast. They evenly split up the two-hour block between newspapers, and each newspaper typically gets 10 to 15 minutes of time.
In addition to reading national and local newspapers, the station offers a wide selection of books and magazines. Nigro says volunteers and the programming manager collaborate to determine what will be read on the air.
Most of the books the volunteers read have been published within the last two years."Our mission is to keep people current," Nigro says.
—Carole Smith,
Audio-Reader volunteer
Smith and Colyer also say they try not to editorialize, and they do their best to avoid hot-button topics unless they have
When selecting stories to read, Smith and Colyer say they are most concerned with making sure the stories keep a local focus. They will read stories about what's happening in a town, but they avoid national stories unless they have some local connection. Sometimes they try to describe pictures if they think it might help tell a story or think it might be important to the listeners.
"Newspapers of Central and West-
a local focus. If they do read something from the opinion page or something with a bias, they try to balance it out by reading an opposing opinion. They read the stories just as they are written, without any additions or omissions on their part.
Both women say they like their program because they learn a lot about Kansas through the newspapers they read, and because Audio-Reader is very important to the people it serves.
Smith once had the opportunity to meet one of the listeners, a woman who had just gotten married and had requested that some of the volunteers read a cookbook she had bought. She wanted to know how to cook, Smith says, and Audio-Reader helped make that happen.
"You just don't think about things like that—about how much that can affect someone's everyday life," Smith says. "When I read, I try and think about who is listening and how important it might be to them."
Colyer says Audio-Reader is useful because of the diverse set of programs it offers, from readings of grocery ads to national newspapers to technology magazines.
"It's a comprehensive set of services. Not a whole lot of people use it, but for those who do, it's very important." Colyer says."It's their eyes and ears on the world."
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