WGBH seeks participants for survey on synthesized speech and audio description

Posted to the DTB mailing list

IBM Research-Japan and WGBH's Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) are conducting a joint study via
an online survey on the applicability of speech synthesis for audio description of Web-based video.

Adults (18+ years of age) who are blind or have low vision will be asked to share their opinions about a few short video clips which include synthesized description.

NCAM is seeking participants with a range of familiarity with synthesized speech (from little or none to regular users) and as well
as familiarity with audio description (from little or none to regular users).
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Fun for bibliophiles

The random page button on
the Library and Information Science Wiki
http://liswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
is full of nifty terms, like "book dummy" -- how did I never learn about book dummies?

Conflicting conclusions regarding Kindle use amongst college students

according to this page on the
Princeton University Kindle Pilot Results
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/64/38E35/index.xml?section=topstories

the pilot program was a success because it reduced the use of paper, while according to this Inside Higher Ed article
Highlighting E-Readers
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/23/ereaders

many students felt that the Kindle fell short of their needs.

The Princeton study attempts to separate the satisfied users from the rest of the users by calling the satisfied users "power users" while framing the dissatisfied users as less technologically adept, but in looking at the criticisms, I notice that many of the criticisms are highly relevant to people with learning and print disabilities, such as the lack of highlighting capability, or the inability to make annotations to PDF docs. The first article doesn't really frame these dissatisfactions as criticisms, however, but as quote suggestions unquote.

I'm also interested in hearing textbook publishers position on the Kindle read aloud feature, as this is another way that many students with print disabilities manage their reading. Are textbook publishers and individual professors going to allow this feature?