Washington state’s only braille library has reopened for walk-in service, almost a year after the facility in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood was forced to close due to budget cuts.
The Washington State Talking Book & Braille Library helps people who have difficulty reading due to a physical disability or learning disorder by providing them with audiobooks, braille books and braille e-readers.
An increase in real estate transactions and related fees enabled the library to reopen and provide programs such as “multisensory storytime” and early literacy kits.
The library serves about 7,800 patrons a year, said Deputy Secretary of State Randy Bolerjack, who leads the state’s library system. Disability advocates who welcomed the library’s reopening said the facility is an invaluable resource for their community.
“The summer reading program and the storytimes: They make a huge difference,” said Marci Carpenter, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Washington. She said the library helped her to read as a kid. “Kids can get braille books for school, but it’s really not enough to cultivate a real love of reading.”
The library on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Lenora Street looks almost like a cafe: It feels smaller and more intimate than most libraries.
The library was founded in 1906 when the Seattle Public Library introduced braille services. In 1967, the program expanded to help with others who were unable to read because of a disability.
In 1975, Washington state took over funding, with the Seattle Public Library running it under contract. In 2008, the state began directly operating the facility.
A lack of state funding, stemming from a drop in real estate transaction fees, led to last year’s budget cuts.
Danielle Miller, the library’s director, said it had to close down the physical location, layoff employees and turn to voicemail-only services. The cuts made the library’s programs and services much less accessible to the community, Miller said.
The library was able to reopen because a drop in interest rates led to more real estate transactions and fees, which help to fund the library, Bolerjack said. The library hopes to get more appropriations from the state’s budget for greater stability going forward.
The library helps make Seattle a more blind-friendly spot to live, said Andrea Kadlec, an attorney from Disability Rights Washington. She said the library acts as a hub for the blind community.
“There are some people who are born blind, so they have kind of their whole life to figure it out. But there are also people who become blind later in life or become deaf and blind,” Kadlec said. “There is a huge learning curve to navigate with acquiring that disability or set of disabilities. The Washington Talking Book & Braille Library is a resource for people to navigate that time in their life.”
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