Superpatron

Mobilizing the friends of the library for the blind

I started thinking about the various projects I've done on this blog (book cover mashups etc) and realized just how useless that most of them were to anyone without full vision.

It might just be my 40-something year old eyes, but it's time to think a bit more about how this blog can be more of a help in how I start to learn how to build applications for the visually impaired, how libraries for the blind can become part of the libraries that overlap with their collections, and how even sighted people like me can learn to read Braille (it can't be that hard, can it?)

Look for less Web 2.0 stuff - that era has passed - and more incomplete solutions to hard problems that show up when you are not working at 100% but still need to make it work.

Every digital book as an audiobook, the Authors Guild, and Assistive Media

Sometimes I clip the headlines just so that a year or two from now we'll wonder what the fuss is.  Today's instance of that is protests by the Author's Guild that Amazon's newest edition of the Kindle has such a good way to do text to speech on the digital texts of digital books that this violates the author's rights to sell the audiobook rights separately from the text.

A piece from Roy Blount, Jr. in the New York Times is instructive in seeing the narrower rights management issue:

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter” or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

Author Neil Gaiman summarizes the author's "get over it" point of view after a discussion with his agent:

My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

My own experience in audio production comes from a long association with Assistive Media, which does audio recordings of short works (magazine articles, short stories, poetry) and produces them for the web. A listener to that service, Gail Elliot-Ross, explains:

“Tom and I both enjoy Assistive Media: it has been one of the most innovative and enjoyable resources for material in alternate format that we have found. Putting things online which are read with REAL voices and are immediately accessible is so useful and has great possibilities. Many advances have been made in technology, such as electronic braille books and computerized voices for text, but the human voice is so delightful in comparison. I now envision instant access to drama, poetry, information brochures...anything!!

Even the best computerized voice sounds mechanical in comparison with the wide variety of sounds you get from when people really read. 

If you want to hear what Neil Gaiman sounds like, you can hear him read his own The Graveyard Book audiobook online on his publisher's site, Harper Collins.

If you want to hear Roy Blount, Jr. reading his own book Long Time Leaving, Dispatches from the South, you can hear an audio advertisement for it at AudioFile.

And, if you want to listen to Kathleen Starling reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Social Life of Paper from the New Yorker (2002), you can hear it (and many more things) at Assistive Media.

More reading on the current state of the Kindle audiobook issue at Techmeme.

Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor, MI) Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled wins LOC award

Congratulations to Mary Udoji and Margaret Wolfe for this honor!

The Washtenaw County Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled (LBPD) has received the first annual Network Subregional Library of the Year Award. Library Services Director Mary E. Udoji and LBPD Librarian Coordinator Margaret Wolfe accepted the award and cash prize at a luncheon held last week at the Library of Congress in Washington DC .

Margaret Wolfe and Mary E. UdojiIn presenting the award, National Library Service Director Frank Kurt Cylke noted that the Washtenaw County LBPD "demonstrated excellence as a subregional library and has raised the bar for providing community outreach and dependable service."

In addition to being recognized for providing excellent service, the Washtenaw County library was cited for seeking "to sustain the social, emotional and intellectual health of people who are blind or live with low vision."

The Library has become an extraordinary resource for the blind and physically handicapped in this community. The library's Book Lovers Club - now in its tenth year - is a bimonthly forum which allows patrons to develop a sense of community and to strengthen friendships. The LBPD presents an open workshop, Braille Instruction and Blind Awareness, for people interested in learning Braille and about the lives of visually impaired people.

(more)

Washtenaw County LBPD loans books and magazines in alternate formats (recorded cassette, large print and Braille) to individuals in Jackson, Livingston and Washtenaw Counties who are unable to read or use normal printed materials as a result of a physical disability. All services are free of charge.

Technorati Tags: annarbor, washtenaw, michigan, library, blind, lowvision, assistive, assistivemedia, isp

Iowa Radio Reading Information Service

From the IRIS web site:

Getting the daily news from Iowa newspapers is as easy as turning on the radio for the 50,000 plus Iowans who cannot read due to impaired vision or physical handicap. More than 260 volunteers around Iowa donate countless hours reading the news from Iowa newspapers, magazines and other publications. With programming from In Touch Network in New York and from Radio Talking Book in St. Paul, the Iowa Radio Reading Information Service (IRIS) operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

IRIS is a member of the International Association of Audio Information Services and is one of approximately 150 non-profit radio reading services for the blind and print handicapped in the United States. IRIS exists solely on contributions from individuals, foundations, corporations and special events. In addition to reading on the air, volunteers support IRIS by delivering radios to listeners and helping in outreach activities.

Listen to the Main IRIS Live Audio Stream
Special thanks to Real Networks for providing IRIS the ability to stream our broadcast services on the Internet.

Listen to Waterloo-Cedar Falls IRIS Stream
Special thanks to the University of Northern Iowa KUNI station and our affiliate KHKE for allowing us to stream this special version of our network.

This is similar to the internet-only Assistive Media service that I work with, which features magazine articles from Harpers, the New Yorker, and other literary and general interest publications.

Assistive Media - magazine audio library

When I said in my introduction that I'm not a librarian, I should at least make some small claim of running an online library of my own.

Assistive Media is a collection of audio recordings in short formats (typically 15-60 minutes) of magazine articles from periodicals like The New Yorker, Harpers, Scientific American, and others. Our services are aimed at the visually impaired who would not otherwise have access to these materials through national library for the blind services. David Henry Erdody is the founder. We just released a new site design, which uses Movable Type as its underpinnings, which provides a podcast feed for the site also available in iTunes of new materials. (Thanks to Brian Kerr for that work, which was done as a project for the University of Michigan School of Information.)

The materials are recorded by volunteers, edited by a small team of work study and volunteer recording engineers, and produced and published to a web site. Everything is available free of charge to listeners. The money we raise goes to the overhead of the hosting and the student audio production, and our goal is to get a very small recording studio of our own which would redouble the amount of audio that we could record and edit.

As the collection grows (we're around 500 titles right now) it's starting to feel a lot more like a set of skills and approaches to media cataloging and what I think of as library skills need to come into play. How do you arrange titles so that people can find them? What sort of indexing and cataloging are helpful so that people can locate materials by browsing or by Googling the collection? And of course since the primary audience are people of low vision, there are a ton of questions that I don't have ready first hand experience with on accessibility.

I would love to figure out what I could do (as a publisher and as an online library) to get our collection more widely used. What do I need to provide to public libraries around the world to let them know about the service? What special things can I provide to libraries for the blind and visually impaired that would allow them to tell their patrons about the services? Are traditional libraries even the best way to promote these sorts of services, or should we aim more directly at other media outlets to get the word out?