Teeter Talk: interview with Alicia Wise, Publishers Licensing Society, London UK

Teeter Talk is an interview blog by "Homeless Dave" in Ann Arbor, MI. He invites people to his house, has them sit on the teeter-totter in his back yard, and then they teeter-totters away while talking to each other. Outdoors. In the winter. In Michigan. It's great.

He's a great interviewer, and for this issue he has Alicia Wise who is in town for the digitization symposium. (I'll be blogging as much of that as I can.) You'll want to read the whole thing for the publisher's side of the Google Book Search equation, but I did want to call out this bit for accessibility of books to the visually impaired that's happening in the UK.

Teeter Talk:

HD: Did you go to the talk by the guy from Google, John Needham?

AW: No. Been there. Done it. Seen it.

HD: So you weren't expecting him to say anything new?

AW: No. But I spoke in that room just before he did, ... I think it was the same room. We were coming out, and we'd been doing this really worthy presentation about how to make more books accessible to blind people: there were ten people in the audience. And we come out and the entire hallway is wall-to-wall with a sea of seething publishers wanting to get a piece of Google action. Never mind!

HD: Yeah, the New York Times reported it was standing room only. I guess people were hovering around the doorway hoping people would leave a little early so they could sneak in for the last bit. So tell me about this project for the blind.

AW: It's really cool actually. It's in partnership with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, who have got a campaign called the Right to Read. And they're helping raise awareness in Britain right now that only about five percent of books that are published are ever made accessible in ways that blind, vision-impaired or dyslexic readers can access. So they're trying to work with the industry and with authors. The way it would work is this. When a book is created, even if it is only published in print, it's of course created in digital form: Word files, or Quark files or PDF's or whatever. So the idea is the publisher will give the electronic files to the Royal National Institute for the Blind before publication. The RNIB will be a trusted partner. They'll reformat those files and then make the versions that are needed in the blind community accessible on the same day that the print is published. They'll reformat them into audio books, into large print formats, into Braille, and there's also a format called DAISY, which is an electronic version, where you hear it and while you're reading along on the screen, the text that's being read is highlighted. It's a really cool and important project. I'm really excited about it.

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Comments

[Petrona]

Hello, just to say that I think this is an excellent idea, and well done for highlighting it on your blog.

[Rolf - Audio Books Fan]

Yes, especially as it will avoid tremendous cost for the RNIB. Trying to produce a book from scratch often prevents production simply due to cost. Hope this comes to fruition!