In this issue
- Letter from CELA’s Executive Director
- Awards update!
- What did we learn from our braille study?
- Back to school with CELA
- Reading for Truth and Reconciliation
- Reading in the news
- Webinars for you
- Featured title for adults: The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
- Top five books
- Featured title for kids: Snakes: What Do Cobras, Pythons, and Anacondas Get Up to All Day?
- Top five for kids
- Top five for teens
- Holiday hours
- Stay connected!
Letter from CELA’s Executive Director
As summer wraps up, so, too, do libraries’ summer book club programs for kids. Across Canada, libraries run creative programs to help keep kids engaged in reading and enjoying books and libraries. At CELA, we do all we can to support libraries who want to run accessible and inclusive book clubs, including offering the TDSRC Accessibility Award. If your library participated in the TD Summer Reading Club and did a great job welcoming kids of all reading abilities, please encourage them to submit an application for this award. The deadline is in a few weeks, and prize money can be used to support their programming or accessible initiatives all year long.
As the book clubs for kids wind down, many of the clubs for adults begin again after a summer hiatus. A recent CBC story talked about all the different ways book clubs are run now, with themes, added activities in kitchens or coffee shops, silent reading clubs and awards-based book clubs. We are delighted again this year to be working with major literary awards in Canada to make accessible versions of shortlisted titles available so that readers and book clubs can get timely access. Watch our Awards page for updates and reading lists for the Giller, the Governor General and other awards as they make their announcements in the coming weeks!
While our newsletter was on hiatus for the summer, our team was not. We’ve been busy ingesting new books, including over 400 French braille books, creating new webinars and updating others to offer fresh content to our readers and member libraries and working behind the scenes on projects including our audiobooks project and others. We’ve also completed our Braille study report which we are excited to share with you.
Check out this newsletter for more information about what we have been up to this summer, and to learn more about the great books in our collection.
Laurie Davidson, Executive Director
Awards update!
Crime Writers of Canada recently announced the winners of their 2024 Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. The awards recognize the best in mystery, crime, suspense fiction and crime nonfiction by Canadian authors, including citizens abroad and new residents. Congratulations to these winners!
Best First Crime Novel: The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
Howard Engel Award for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada: Wild Hope by Joan Thomas
Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery: The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose
Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book: Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline
The Hugo Awards are one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious literary awards. The 2024 winners include:
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh for Best Novel,
Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher for Best Novella
and Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie for Best Series.
For more information about literary awards visit our Awards page.
Braille study
We are delighted that the executive summary of our braille study has been completed and is ready to be shared. Learn what respondents had to say about the various ways they read braille, what’s important to them about accessible braille materials, what they wished we had more of, and whether they would sacrifice quality for quantity.
(Spoiler Alert: they deserve both high quality braille and lots of choice).
And what will CELA do with what we learned? We’ve already started integrating more braille into our collection wherever possible and we will be looking for ways to meet the need for more choices of high quality and timely braille into our collection.
You can find a link to the final report on our website.
Back to school with CELA
Reading can unlock so much: imagination, information and, for many kids, it is essential to success in school. While not everyone reads the same way, everyone deserves access to all that reading has to offer.
CELA can help children with print disabilities access the books they’ll need for school or for pleasure reading.
When it comes time for students to start working on research projects, we have an extensive collection of non-fiction materials suited to a range of reading levels. We also have go-to fiction titles that are commonly used in reading assignments, including books by Canadian and Indigenous authors, as well as award winners and classics. Our digital materials, including e-text, audiobooks, and electronic braille are available for immediate downloading, which is particularly handy the night before an assignment is due!
Through our Educator Access Program your child’s teacher and resource staff can get free access to the full CELA collection. And we provide support and training so they can make the most of these accessible books. Please feel free to share this information with the educators you know.
With the right supports from you and your child’s teacher, as well as accessible materials from CELA, your child can feel more confident starting a new school year.
Reading for Truth and Reconciliation
Studies show that reading fiction can increase people’s empathy and compassion. This makes reading a great way to participate in the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30. We chose a few recent additions to our collection as a starting point.
North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner by By Marie Wilson in audio and braille
A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by Phil Fontaine, Aimée Craft
Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada by Michelle Good in audio and braille.
And Then She Fell: A Novel by Alicia Elliott in audio and braille.
Reading in the news
GQ recently ran a piece about why men don’t read fiction and why it is important that we make fiction more interesting and accessible for men. Interestingly, the article was published just before former President Obama released his summer reading list, which included nine fiction titles. And CBC got in on the discussion as well.
Looking for book suggestions? Check out our Recommended page or catch us on Now with Dave Brown on AMI every other Friday where we feature interesting titles in our collection.
Webinars for you
We host a series of webinars on Zoom to help users access CELA services, to stay up to date on new technologies and to learn more about accessible reading.
On the Webinars for you page, you will find upcoming webinars. On that same page you will find links to other CELA video resources available on our YouTube channel.
Navigating the CELA website with JAWS or NVDA
This webinar will provide participants with a comprehensive guided tour of the CELA webpage using screen reader navigation with JAWS or NVDA. Through a live, described demonstration, participants will learn helpful tips and strategies regardless of whether they are beginners, or advanced users of the website.
The demonstration will show:
- Essential JAWS/NVDA hotkeys used for quicker or more efficient navigation.
- How to conduct a simple and advanced search, refine the search results, and then how to get a title from that search.
- How to browse the collection using links such as New titles, Recommended reading, Top 5 picks and Awards.
- Set search preferences and much more.
Select the link below to register for this webinar:
Ask us! Come chat with CELA staff and have your questions answered
This hour long interactive conversation gives CELA users an opportunity to ask questions related to using CELA’s library services. We encourage you to bring your questions and learn from CELA staff, as well as share experiences with other CELA patrons in the audience. This Q&A aims to support how you access the books, magazines and newspapers in CELA’s multiple format collections for people with print disabilities.
Select the link below to register for this conversation:
Envoy Connect: An accessible and affordable audiobook player
In May 2023, CELA launched our new service which uses the Envoy Connect audiobook player to read books in CELA’s collection. This webinar will provide a basic introduction to the Envoy Connect player, a portable, affordable and easy-to-use device. This webinar is for anyone who prefers listening to audiobooks using self-contained players with a tactile interface, rather than through computers, smartphones or tablets.
This webinar will cover:
- Background and context to explain how and why the Envoy Connect became an option for accessing audio books.
- Basics of the Envoy Connect Player: what it is, how it works, etc.
- How to manage books on the Envoy Connect with the CELA Connect software.
Where to find learning resources or purchase the player.
Select the link below to register for this webinar:
Thursday Oct 24 1:00-2:00pm EDT
Accessing CELA using a Victor Reader Stream DAISY Player
Do you own a Humanware Victor Reader Stream? Are you considering getting one to access reading materials from CELA? Join us for this hour-long webinar about how this versatile device lets you read CELA’s books and magazines in audio and e-text formats. This webinar is for new Victor Stream users or those interested in learning new tips. By attending this webinar, you will learn about:
- General features of the Victor Stream, and what’s new with the latest model
- Configuring the device for use with CELA
- How to navigate and manage your Direct to Player bookshelf
- Reading a title and playback options
- How to find help in using the Victor Stream with CELA
Select the link below to register for this webinar:
Featured title for adults: The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
The definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page. Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later.
She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View.She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny. Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Read The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page.
Top five books
Most popular with our readers this month:
- Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?: A Novel by Nicci French, Mysteries and crime stories
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, Biography
- The Whispers: A Novel by Ashley Audrain, Suspense and thrillers
- Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page, Biography
- The Briar Club: A Novel by Kate Quinn, Suspense and thrillers
Featured title for kids: Snakes: What Do Cobras, Pythons, and Anacondas Get Up to All Day?
This audiobook features sound design and special effects to enhance your enjoyment of Snakes (A Day in the Life). Listen out for the rattle of rattlesnakes and snake-charming music! Set over 24 hours, meet rattlesnakes, vipers, and black mambas in this kids' nonfiction book by TikTok star and snake expert Christian Cave.
Journey around the world to follow the lives of these cold-blooded reptiles as they hunt, hide, and fight their way through their day. Biologist and conservationist Christian Cave tells the story of the world's most amazing venomous snakes in the style of a nature documentary, including gentle science explanations of topics such as camouflage and skin shedding that are perfect for future biologists. Witness incredible moments including: A paradise flying snake soaring through the air to escape a predator A king cobra defending her eggs from a mongoose A spider-tailed viper using its tail to catch birds! Packed with animal facts, Snakes (A Day in the Life) encourages kids to look at the roles these incredible legless predators play in ecosystems across the globe, and why it's important we protect them. A Macmillan Audio production from Neon Squid.
Read Snakes: What Do Cobras, Pythons, and Anacondas Get Up to All Day? by Christian Cave.
Top five for kids
Most popular with kids this month:
- The Ugly Place by Laura Deal, Multi-cultural fiction
- Abby and the Best Kid Ever The Baby-Sitters Club #116 by Ann M. Martin
- The Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, Fantasy
- The Baby-Sitters Club Mystery #23: Abby and the Secret Society by Ann M. Martin, Mysteries and crime stories
- The Adventures of Hotsy Totsy by Clive Cussler, Adventure stories
Top five for teens
Most popular with teens this month:
- Hatchet: Hatchet Series, Book 1 by Gary Paulsen, Adventure stories
- Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass #1) by Sarah J. Maas, Adventure stories
- The Inheritance Games (Inheritance Games #1) by Jennifer Barnes, Suspense and thrillers
- The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings #1) by J. R. R. Tolkein, Fantasy
- The Hunger Games (Hunger Games #1) by Suzanne Collins, Science fiction
Holiday hours
CELA and its Contact Center will be closed on Monday, September 3 for Labour Day and will resume usual hours on Tuesday, September 4.
We will also be closed on Monday, October 14 for Thanksgiving and will return to regular hours on Tuesday, October 15.
Enjoy your holiday!
Stay connected!
Visit CELA's social media, including X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, YouTube and our blog, for more news about what's happening in the world of accessible literature.