file viewing with bookmarks saving?

Janina Sajka janina at rednote.net
Sat Aug 9 10:18:23 EDT 2003


I think BookShare's O'Reily titles are worthy of complaint. I intend to
let them know of my strong disappointment with how they're treating
these. Let me explain why briefly, because I think several of us making
the same complaint would get some good changes made.

Of course this won't help us get a Linux DAISY reader, but it will give
us more appropriately tagged content once such a reader is made
available.

When BookShare first announced support for DAISY, they were thinking
they could take uploaded content from individuals like you and I and
wrap it up in a few useful DAISY tags. That means canned content. This
kind of content doesn't usually provide chapter and section navigation,
as DAISY tagging supports. It's all visual marking--therefore the page
and paragraph stuff we now see from BookShare.

The O'Reily files are different, as I understand it. They're marked up
at the chapter and section level, and more.

Therefore, applying the same transformations to O'Reily as BookShare
applies to uploaded content from scanners is inappropriate. Moreover, it
is a disservice to us, it's customers.

BookShare needs to develop an appropriate set of XSLT transform scripts
to more appropriately render the O'Reily titles in DAISY 3.0.

While not a trivial task, I don't believe this is a very dificult task.
My guess is a couple of weeks of someone's time.

I believe this needs to be a BookShare priority. And, when they have
these scripts, they need to re-issue all their O'Reily titles with the
superior markup these scripts will produce.

Steve Holmes writes:
> From: Steve Holmes <steve at holmesgrown.com>
> 
> Some of the books such as the O'Reily ones are only in DAISY and not
> anything else.  Hence the need for parsing the XML or whatever.  I
> know little or nothing much about DAISY right now except for some of
> the navigation aspects.  It was mentioned in another message that
> bookshare was mainly concerned about page navigation; not sure if that
> meant only between pages or what.  I would especially find chapter and
> section navigation as well as jumping off from a table of contents to
> be of great importance.
> 
> DAISY reader for linux? <hmmm> that could be an interesting project.
> I'm really not qualified to go and write another web browser but
> parsing the XML code to something meaningful perhaps?  Gee, even if I
> could translate into navigable HTML document for starters would be
> better than what we have right now.
> 
> On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 10:48:44AM -0400, Ann Parsons wrote:
> > Hi Steve,
> > 
> > The booksshare books are either in DAISY or in BRF files.  I haven't
> > tried the DAISY stuff, but Raman's made noises about a DAISY reader
> > for Emacspeak.  I think you can read the xml files from the DAISY
> > books.  I haven't tried that.  I just download the BRF files and back
> > translate 'em with NFBtrans.
> > 
> > Ann P.
> > 
> > -- 
> > 			Ann K. Parsons  
> > email:  akp at eznet.net 			ICQ Number:  33006854
> > WEB SITE:  http://home.eznet.net/~akp
> > "All that is gold does not glitter.  Not all those who wander are lost."  JRRT
> > 
> > 
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-- 
	
				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




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