510,000 WeChat users donate their voices for online audio books for the blind

Over half a million people joined hands to contribute their voice through social media to add a human touch to the audio books made for blind children in China.

WeChat’s “The Voice Donor” welfare campaign launched on the mobile social media application offered a paragraph of text from a list of selected books to each of its users and invited them to record them on their mobile phones, and send back via the application.

The app, developed by internet giant Tencent, then gathers all the audio files received from users and composes them into audio books available to 100 schools for the blind across China.

Since the campaign was launched in August, over 510,000 users have contributed a total of over 2.3 million audio clips. Nearly 10,000 blind children have received the audio books made from these soundtracks via a reading device provided by WeChat.

“With this welfare campaign, we are hoping to draw our users from all over the world into caring for blind people,” a WeChat spokesperson told the South China Morning Post.

With help from the public, the sound clips were ultimately compiled into a list of 150 audio books selected by WeChat. They range from popular world fiction like and , to Chinese classics and works like by contemporary novelist Han Han.

WeChat said it launched the campaign, instead of transcribing electronic books into audio files automatically, because “this new way of doing charity allows more members of the public to participate so it draws more attention to the need of blind people”.