What I did on my summer holidays.

[Saqib Shaikh]

Hi Janina,

I was really happy to hear that we'll be getting Daisy books in the spring!

What you say about "getting permission from the publishers" hits home right
enough. While this law is on the verge of changing here in the UK it means:
1. Books are rediculously out of date. The most recent braille title on
computing we have is the MS-DOS 5.0 users manual!
2. Tapes are also out of date. I wanted a Tanenbaum book for my hardware
course (something like 5th editicion 2001). 4th edition would have been ok
but I got 1st edition, 1978. Three years before I was born! So I got to
learn about how computers were long before I was thought of <grin>
3. We're also excluded from the US National Braille Library's ebraille
initiative and also the bookshare project.
4. To finish off my ranting I did the following research a year and a half
ago before I started my degree. Following the findings I have given up on
books in special formats and just have a humna reader.
Findings:
I was told that a thousand page computer science text would take approx 1.5
years to put onto tape. Approx 3-5 years to put into braille.
A braille/taping centre at a nearby university offered to do the job until
they realised that nobody knew anything about squiggly brackets etc and sad
no can do. Finally, I looked into putting a book into braille privately from
two different sources. Both stated that they would charge approx £30 or $50
per hour, making a grand total of 10 thousand pounds approx fifteen thousand
dollars.

I'll leave you with that thought.

Saqib
----- Original Message -----
From: "Janina Sajka" <janina at afb.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 2:29 AM
Subject: Re: What I did on my summer holidays.


> I think Kirk got it about right below. Especially the part about "summer,"
> because it was certainly unseasonally warm in Toronto last week! <grin>
>
> One note about the 15/16 ips, four-track cassettes as specialized media.
> This format was defined explicitly as a specialized format for blind users
> of specially produced content. One can think of this format as a kind of
> analog tape intellectual property protection scheme. We can hope and dream
> of a day when we don't need such things, but we need them now if we're
> going to have access to large quantities of published books in a
> format/medium that really works for us.
>
> I should note that many countries are jealous of the U.S.' Chafee
> Amendement. In most other countries (though not all), organizations
> producing braille or audio (and soon the DAISY format) need to get
> permission in writing from copyright holders before they can begin to
> produce a title. This takes a lot of time, and, of course, producing
> titles takes a lot of time to. One side benefit of the Chafee Amendment
> means that titles can be made available much more quickly than before.
>
> The goal, of course, is to get as many titles produced in the DAISY format
> as quickly as possible, and to get them into users' hands as quickly as
> possible. Another goal is to give users a wide range of choices in the
> technology they use to "read" this content. There are already some
> hardware devices that 'play" DAISY titles--and there will be more. There
> are also software players already--and there will be many more of these,
> on all the OS used by us.
>
> So, I am very glad that Kirk was with us last week. The Digital Talking
> Book technology is going to be very important to our community, and we
> need the widest range of experience and viewpoint in getting the basics
> right so that anyone and everyone who qualifies can participate.
>
> PS: If you live in the U.K., you will have the option of titles in DAISY
> late this spring. Here in the States, we'll have to wait a bit longer.
>
>
> --
>
> Janina Sajka, Director
> Technology Research and Development
> Governmental Relations Group
> American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
>
> Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175
>
> Chair, Accessibility SIG
> Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
> http://www.openebook.org
>
>
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