[bksvol-discuss] Re: Question on Scan quality for blind vs other types of disabled bookshare readers

  • From: Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:48:58 -0500

I have to agree with Misha here. A font that is in 72 point doesn't speak properly with speech, and my sighted daughter says it doesn't look right in print either. I don't think it ruins anyone's day to bring that font size down to 16 or 18 point. Sighted people tend to adjust their fonts to look right to them, and I seriously doubt they will read a book in 72 point fonts. One of the books I'm validating right now has fonts ranging from 48 to 72 points all the way through it, making part of a word show on each line. I have set the 72-point fonts to 18 points and the 48-point fonts at 14 points so I can read it with speech. A sighted reader will still get the effect of larger text in certain areas. Beyond these modifications, I'm not willing to go through and check every line to see what is bold and where drop caps should be. Life is just too short to spend on that kind of thing. If that were a required part of validating, I'd quit doing it and go back to scanning, something I prefer doing anyhow. (smile) I want to enjoy the content of books and have enough to worry about just focusing on fixing scanning errors.


Monica Willyard


Misha wrote:
Cool, modern screen readers are as sophisticated as other types of programs, and if necessary blind readers can get pretty much all the information out of a page sighted readers can. But, OCR programs for all their sophistication still can do weird things like changing font, size, bold, line spacing, and so on where there is no actual change in the book. So, at least for general fiction, I'd accept changing everything to one font and size. Paragraph indents can be very useful. Changing chapter headings to a larger size or to bold is nice. Trying to duplicate things like drop caps (the big capital letters, usually in a fancy font at the beginning of a chapter) is definitely not necessary. It's usually just the publisher (not the author) being pretentious, Ok, that's just my opinion, but I'm sticking to it.

Misha

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