Audiobooks at their heart (at least in the form of “talking books”) were made with accessibility in mind after all. Pretty much every new book that comes out is recorded as an Audiobook in some fashion as well. Audible exclusives always felt quite scummy for that reason alone, as it is restricting what is at it’s heart an accessible media format.
I’m very curious if it’s mainstream popularity though has led to more blind/visually impaired people being able to consume more books than before. It would be really cool if it has or has at least loosened that barrier a bit more!
We are close to that. Projects like Amazon Polly or Google Text-to-Speech AI will probably be integrated and will work seamlessly (if you pay for a monthly subscription of course). There are also a million AI based projects that try to do the same to varying degrees of success.