Hi Cindy. All books submitted to Bookshare are converted to daisy and Braille formats. This means that you can be absolutely sure of what will be retained after you upload your book. As far as I can tell, they fully retain and use bold text, point sizes, and font face changes in books. I don't think they actively process italics though. When we met with Jake when the old Bookshare chat room was active, that's what he told us about the new Bookshare stripper. I kept my notes and just looked at them for verification. As for knowing when fonts are bold, italicized, or if the point size or font type changes, we can set our screenreaders to tell us verbally. We can set it to detect color changes too. We can have the pitch of the voice change, and there is also a keystroke we can press that announces of font or color of the text where we are. We can also use completely different voices to alert us to font or color changes if we like. Many totally blind people don't use these methods since font and color changes mean very little to us. We can't see them, and I can't honestly say I know the difference between Times New Roman and Arial, other than that I know they have different shapes. For me, having my speech tell me about fonts is distracting. I don't do it when reading for my own pleasure. I turn on font notification only when I'm preparing a book for Bookshare. Whenever I'm tempted to skip it, I picture people like Judy and Nicole comfortably reading my book while sipping some hot tea or coffee, relaxing and not needing to use their voice recognition program to constantly adjust the fonts. At first I did it out of a desire to make their lives better. Now I have unexpectedly learned something about how sighted people communicate by how and when they bold or draw attention to text. This has helped me become a better web designer and writer. So by helping them, I inadvertently helped myself too. (smile) Monica Willyard "The best way to predict the future is to create it." -- Peter Drucker -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Cindy Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2009 7:03 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Bolded words in text But we don't know when we submit or upload books whether they're going to be converted to Daisy or not, do we? And we're supposed to keep the file as cl;close as possible to the print book, so I'd retain italics, bold, and larger fonts as needed--jmo. When one is listening to a book (is that Daisy?), does one hear emphasis when a word is italicized? Do you scanners listen when you scan? Or how do you know if words need to be italicized? The book I'm soon to upload I have because it needed page breaks, but as I put in the breaks I found I had to eye-scan the print page because there are a lot of words I found that hadto be changed in the file to italics. It was just accident that a sighted proofer happened to get this file. How would a blind scanner know that a book needed a sighted proofer to put in italics? Can the OCR be set to scan italicised words or words with an odd font? cindy Cindy To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.