Including All Children in the Scottish Childrens Book Awards

The Scottish Children's Book Awards is an innovative nationwide reading project in which children and young people from every corner of Scotland read and vote for their favourite Scottish children's books of the year. Last year over an amazing 31,000 votes were cast and children and young people from every local authority in Scotland, from Aberdeen to Dumfries; Shetland to Arran, took part. The awards are run by the Scottish Book Trust.

Children can vote for their favourite book, from a shortlist in each of three categories, either as individual readers or as part of a reading group in a school, library or bookshop. The shortlisted books are:

Early Years (0 - 7 years)

• Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson
• What's the Time, Mr Wolf? by Debi Gliori
• Jumblebum by Chae Strathie and Ben Cort

Younger Readers (8 - 11 years)

• Black Tide by Caroline Clough
• The Accidental Time Traveller by Janis Mackay
• Really Weird Removals.com by Daniela Sacerdoti

Older Readers (11 - 16 years)

• The Seeing by Diana Hendry
• The Book of Doom by Barry Hutchison
• Ferryman by Claire McFall

But what about disabled children who can't read the books?

• children with spinal injury, cerebral palsy or other physical impairments can click a switch or press a key on a computer, to turn pages and read the books by themselves;
• dyslexic readers or children with visual impairments can change the font size and/or colours on screen, or use text-to-speech software to read the books;
• the books can be read out by the computer using "Heather" or "Stuart", the high quality Scottish computer voices that is available free for schools and pupils from CALL Scotland's The Scottish Voice web site.