Abstract
Oral readings of John Milton's Paradise Lost are not new to Milton Studies, beginning with the author himself during the epic's composition due to Milton's late-onset blindness. Nonetheless, we can examine how the ever-evolving oral readings of Paradise Lost in New Zealand over the past thirty years can help organizers of any literary oral reading meet the diverse accessibility needs of their participants—especially students. Participants in those readings have seen shifts from no-tech analogue tools such as printed text read in person, to low-tech digital tools such as PowerPoint presented for a group, to higher-tech cloud-based video and communication platforms for virtual meetings such as Zoom for myriad global participants. Tracing those oral readings from the 1990s to the 2020s rather serendipitously allows us to see how those three options offer different accessibility limitations and affordances for organizers to meet the needs of participants, from sight or hearing impairments to mobility impairments to synchronous or asynchronous learning preferences. This paper aims to identify how no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech readings (or any combination thereof) can provide diverse literature enthusiasts with greater access to the texts that we research and teach.