[Web4lib] More on the Open Content Alliance

[Karen Coyle]

Lars,

The DAISY Digital Talking Book format, a NISO standard, is expressly 
designed to synchronize text and a spoken version of the text (not a 
computer voice reading the text, but a human reading of the text), and 
can allow either visual reading of or listening to the text. It should 
allow software to do nifty things like:
  - spell (outloud) a word that has been read. This feature is very 
important to non-sighted readers of textbooks who will want to use those 
words in their own writings
 - pronounce (outloud) any word in the text for someone who is reading 
the text visually, not listening to the sound version.
 - link to footnotes and graphics (which can be enlarged for those with 
poor sight)
 - allow non-sighted persons to have full navigation from a table of 
contents, indices, or directly to, pages. This is very hard today with 
books recorded on tape or CD.

The standard is NISO Z39.86.

kc

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Roy Tennant wrote:
>
>  
>
>>FYI, more information on the Ajax-based Flipbook viewer that 
>>everyone seems to hate is available at 
>><http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/10/introducing-open-library-and-ajax.html>.
>>    
>>
>
>The web design of openlibrary.org is great fun and I'll try to use 
>it as inspiration even though it needs a lot of tuning before it 
>can become useful.
>
>For example, the "listen" link that leads to "There is presently 
>no recording available for this book" needs to be a wiki-style 
>"edit" link, so that I can read the text of this page into the 
>system here and now.  Can you do sound uploads in web forms? HTML 
>clearly needs a <soundarea> tag for this.  And a <videoarea> for 
>sign language uploads and editing.  Can Firefox do video editing?  
>It should, if this is going to be the Web 2.0.
>
>Will the sound playback be synchronized with the text, karaoke 
>style? What would HTML for karaoke look like? Can AJAX do that?
>
>The web we have now is just so primitive, so 20th century.
>
>
>  
>

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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