[bksvol-discuss] Re: question

  • From: Debby Franson <the.bee@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 09 May 2010 14:17:23 -0500

Hi Andromache and everyone!

A few times, I have called my library about books I was proofing, and the librarians were very helpful to read the sentences that have had garbled text and so many chapter headings were missing that I also had to ask her to page through the around 400 page book and tell me where each chapter started and where the blank pages were, because there seemed to be too many, but there really werent, because the book had three different parts with the part title on a page by itself and a blank page before and after it.

Also, I have found books.google.com invaluable while being stumped on words or just uncertain as to whether they were what was really in the hard copy, which I didn't have, so, as long as the page is not restricted, I have been able to fill in or replace garbled words that way too.

WordWeb, which I have discussed in a post a while back is also a great tool, because of finding a lot of words in the dictionary or going online from the link or button in the dictionary, which might take you to an online dictionary or wikipedia where I have found answers to some rather arcaic, British or expressions used in South Africa that were words that were unfamiliar to me, or is good for acronyms, too.

All of this to say that there are ways to get around problems without having a hard copy to get a book into perfect quality.

Debby

At 05:27 PM 5/7/2010, Andromache wrote
Sometimes I feel your pain. The scan can be really good, but then you hit a snag like formatting. Or the submission wasn't even spellchecked, so simple textual errors are missed. It's not so bad for a sighted volunteer if they can get a hard copy, but for someone totally blind, they either have to rescan pages or guess at words. So yeah, numbers, foreign languages, and complex tables and graphs are all but impossible.

When I submit books to Bookshare, I try to ensure that there are no junk characters or incomplete words. I find it tough to find things I can do as well, because, like you, I'm either not interested or the submission is a raw scan with no guarantee that all the text will be there. So I've gotten to a point where I look through the book, and if I see that there are words cut off, I release if there aren't too many and reject if there are many errors.

Andromache

On 5/7/2010 3:16 AM, gwen tweedy wrote:
I know it won't be me because it's tougher for totally blind people to do things like this. I'm finding it hard to find anything to proofread partly because I'm so picky *smile* that is why I did some children's books because I love them, but I knew there would be no surprises such as strong language violence and explicit discriptions a person like me may have to give it up because I'll have nothing to do and just go back to reading. yeah there are numbers of books up there but if you don't know what doesn't have these things or ones that have quirks that sighted people need to do nothing against that, but for me being totally blind, I'm just finding it more frustrating to even find a book and yes I know that is just me so disregard this whiner you'd call it. If I'm not going to be interested in a book or have the fear of what I'll run into in the book, well it just seems more and more the choices for me are gone I have nothing to choose from, cause there is something I can't do in it, it needs to be worked on by someone smarter better than me or it's old and you can't and the list goes on
some days I just get hit with the give ups!
Gwen

    ----- Original Message -----
    *From:* Kim Friedman <mailto:kimfri11@xxxxxxxxxxx>
    *To:* bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    *Sent:* Thursday, May 06, 2010 10:39 PM
    *Subject:* [bksvol-discuss] question

    Hi, if the outsourcers are no longer going to do cookbooks, who
    will? Regards, Kim Friedman.

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