[Dtb-talk] A question about preferred book formatting

[Greg Kearney]

We are able to offer full text/ full audio on books which we produce  
from text files with synthetic narration. Such would be impossible for  
the old tape books without adding so much time and effort that we  
would never get the work done.

There are tools that will split the narration into phases at pauses in  
the narration but this really is not as much help as it would seem to  
be. This generally gives so many phase that you end up having to hunt  
for the chapter divisions anyway.

I agree that pages should be marked and Obi does do this if you are  
recording in it but Dolphin products require that you again, go back  
and listen to the whole book again to mark out the page breaks. We  
have ask Dolphin to fix this but as of yet they have not.

I should stress that in new recording we always offer chapter and  
other navigation these issues only come up when transforming tape to  
DAISY.




Gregory Kearney
Manager - Accessible Media
Association for the Blind of Western Australia
61 Kitchener Avenue, PO Box 101
Victoria Park 6979, WA Australia

Telephone: +61 (08) 9311 8202
Telephone: +1 (307) 224-4022 (North America)
Fax: +61 (08) 9361 8696
Toll free: 1800 658 388 (Australia only)
Email: gkearney at gmail.com

On 30/01/2010, at 8:20 AM, Mary Schnackenberg wrote:

> Two opposite demands need to be balanced, cost versus end user  
> needs. The original print was marked up by chapter or section of  
> some kind, by page, by paragraph, by sentence, by word. The print  
> enabled eye can dwell, read sequentially, skip forwards and  
> backwards. And then there are different fonts and graphics that  
> break up the print and support non-sequential reading. The audio is  
> linear. The challenge is to break up the audio, preferably in line  
> with the print, at minimum cost.
>
> There is a need to give the end user the best possible experience. I  
> understand that the Royal National Institute of Blind People in the  
> United Kingdom, when it began its digitizing project in 2000, broke  
> their DAISY titles every two hours, which happened to be their track  
> length at that time. Because their borrowers have since been exposed  
> to properly marked up DAISY they are having to go back to earlier  
> titles and add in markup. I do not know how many titles they have  
> revisited, but they have had to respond to user demand.
>
> I would recommend that you don't underestimate your users' needs. In  
> my experience (more than 35 years as a librarian, audio and braille  
> producer, and almost 60 years of life as a totally blind person), I  
> have observed users have far higher expectations of narrator quality  
> than 30 years ago and that most users know why print page numbers  
> have a relevance.
>
> I have read that there are DAISY tools that will add markup at each  
> pause in narration. The length of pause that would trigger a marker  
> can be preset. Most narrators pause between chapters. I would not  
> suggest the best pause length for a marker to be inserted as I have  
> not played with this. There are far better minds than mine in the  
> DAISY production arena so someone has real experience of the pause  
> length that would bring best results. I would recommend that you  
> mark up at least to chapter level. Even if you automate this and do  
> not get it right every time, some markup is better than none, in my  
> experience.
>
> One person has said that synchronization of text with audio should  
> be reserved only for reference works. I disagree. There is an often  
> used phrase "recreational reading" or "leisure reading" which, to my  
> ears, dumbs down the end reader.
>
> When I listened to the "leisure" novel The kite runner by Khaled  
> Hosseini I was frustrated that I did not have a parallel text to  
> learn the spelling of so very many words that were unfamiliar to me.  
> Had there been synchronized text, as a braille user, I could have  
> checked the words on my braille display as the excellent narration  
> cruised along. A non braille user could similarly have checked  
> unfamiliar words in the parallel text with speech. I conceed that  
> this improvement to the reading experience may only ever occur with  
> new recordings. Sadly, it seems that few producers routinely match  
> text with audio for their new works, even though it adds very little  
> time to the production process.
>
> Mary
>
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