Kestrell

Question about reading NLS Daisy ebooks from Internet Archive

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:54:45 GMT

Weirdness: this book
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6332139M/A_nursery_in_the_nineties/daisy
doesn't show up through NLS, and when I downloaded it to my BookSense, it opened, but seemed to read a list of contents--About this book, etc.--and then just stopped. The Web site FAQ mentions needing a NLS key, which I have, but doesn't mention any info about how to read this kind of Daisy book. I don't even know if it's audio or text--how can I find out? Has anyone else used this flavor of Daisy books?

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Webinars of book reviews on assistive technology, producing Daisy, Android apps

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:35:07 GMT

From the EASI announcement list

Webinar Book Review Free Webinar:
Universal Design in Higher Education: From Principles to Practice
Presenter: Sheryl Bergstahler, Ph.D. DO-IT, University of Washington
Tuesday June 14, 11 AM Pacific, Noon Mountain, 1 PM Central, 2 PM Eastern
This presentation will provide an overview of the history of universal design,
back to its origins in architecture and product development. The presenter
will share examples of applications of universal design in higher education - to
technology, instruction, services, and physical spaces. She will also discuss
various approaches that have been taken to apply universal design to learning
environments, with a focus on practical applications that instructors can employ to make their courses more welcoming and accessible to all students.
The Webinar is based on the book: Universal Design in Higher Education: From
Principles to Practice edited by Sheryl Burgstahler which is accessible at Bookshare.

Free Webinar: Book Review: Managing the Assistive Technology Process: The
Nontech Guide for Disability Service Providers.
Presenter James Bailey, MS, Adaptive Technology Adviser, University of Oregon.
( continued below cut )

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Free Daisy and ePUB reader programs for visually impaired readersVia an Australian site comes this

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:29:44 GMT

Via an Australian site comes
this list of free Daisy players
http://www.guidedogswa.org/software/
most notably
Emerson
http://code.google.com/p/emerson-reader/
a cross-platform reader which reads both Daisy and ePUB format ebooks (I haven't tried this one out yet so cannot vouch for how accessible it is).

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The ePub format & why blind readers should care about it

Wed, 19 May 2010 22:29:03 GMT

ePub (Electronic Publication)
Filename extension: .epub
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

ePub and DAISY share some similarities but they are different standards. ePub is designed to be the format that the trade (Bookstore) community uses for commercial ebooks and is overseen by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). The current standard contains a DAISY book amongst its internal contents but this is typically locked up in the proprietary delivery format that the individual publishers and book distributors use.

To play DAISY materials you need a DAISY player and several of the commercial players play ePub along with several other formats. Unfortunately the eBook reader manufactures have not typically included a DAISY player in their devices or in their software, if they did you could also play DAISY materials on them. However, as there is a Daisy book and html files already in the ePub ebook, conversion software could be developed that could grab these files and extract them to make the ebook accessible (refer farther down this doc to read Arache's description of one of these conversion programs).
( more info about epub )

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The state of the ebook

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:22:20 GMT

A post
http://followthereader.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/the-day-it-all-changed/
about Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive Founder and Chief Librarian, and his
“BookServer” project
http://www.archive.org/bookserver

Notable quotes:

1.
block quote start
• Next he announced that not only were these files available in ePub form, but that they were available in the “Daisy” format as well. Daisy is the format
used to create Braille and Text to Speech software interpretations of the work.
block quote end
and
2.
block quote start
• Next up, Mike McCabe of IA, came up and demonstrated how files in the Daisy format could be downloaded to a PC then downloaded to a device from Humana,
specifically designed for the reading impaired. The device used Text-to-speech technology to deliver the content, but what was most amazing about this
device was the unprecedented ease at which a sight impaired person could navigate around a book, moving from chapter to chapter, or to specific pages in
the text.
• Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries
fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned
by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The
last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of
information the “dead zone” of publishing. Many of these are the orphan titles that we’ve heard so much about related to the Google Book Settlement –
where no one even knows how to contact the copyright holder.
block quote end

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