I always try to reorganize the book to make it easier to use by someone who is trying to read it using the daisy or Braille files. I have come to the conclusion. if I was making this book accessible to a student who reads Braille at their "first medium" I would want it to be as complete and easy to understand as possible for that student, so that is what I strive for. To do this. I Put title letters back together to make the title readable. Put blank lines where they don't belong away, erase them. remove junk characters that don't belong Label photo captions as "caption" Try to describe pictures if I have someone to help remove extra headers and blank lines to make the book streamlined Protect chapter titles and page numbers from stripping Move sidebars to the bottom of the page, or to a location on the page where they can be read. Fix foot notes if possible and put them at the bottoms of the page. try to group all pictures together on a page if possible not always possible. And do what ever else I can. Like you I can't see the book so usually use my judgment on what is best to keep and what is best to nuke. We want fairly close to the quality of the published book, but if tweaking the files to make them more accessible to our readers, our subscribers, I think is more important. Kurzweil doesn't have a "keep exact view" and I am not sure if It did I would use it. After all, if you did how would you read columns? And with today's fancy formats and the like, even sighted people complain about the layout of some books. If the text is there and on the pages it is supposed to be on, then I say some modifications are accessible. I do not however move text to other pages to put "boxes together" as this is violation of the fundamental formatting of the book in my opinion. Shelley L. Rhodes and Judson, guiding golden juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx Guide Dogs For the Blind Inc. Graduate Advisory Council www.guidedogs.com The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs. -- Vance Havner ----- Original Message ----- From: "Captain357" <Captain357@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Bookshare-Discuss" <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 11:24 AM Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Format editing during validation Hi all, Bookshare's information on page format editing is pretty clear in the validation instructions sent to new volunteers: do what you can and details some specifics. I was looking for additional information on this however. Now, anyone who has done scanning knows that typically the finished scan can have spaces between letters on the title page, blank lines between lines of text, etc, and is most likely not a mirror image of the book. That has been my experience anyway. From my days when I could see, I remember how the average book is structured and formatted, and that is not how many of my scans turn out. Even when viewing in "exact view," (with "keep exact view" set in scanning preferences and all options set to retain as much data as possible) this still tends to be the case. Okay, and let's assume that you do get a perfect duplicate scan of the book, the publishers in making things look their best (larger fonts and erratic spacing in titles and headers) are problems for screen readers and I would think, problematic in the transition from RTF to daisy. That said, does anyone know what the ideal balance between efficiency, speed of validating and quality, performance of the daisy file would be? In other words, how much can the automated RTF to daisy program Bookshare uses to process daisy files, compile and compensate formatting errors mentioned above into a great finished Book? Should we be striving in validation to keep spaces between sentences and letters to a minimal? Should paragraphs be indented? Should we rework fancy visual formats to a simpler, uniform style? Then of course, those of us who are blind can't look at the book to see how formatting appears so there is guessing and assumption involved. I've mentioned just a few specific questions here to get my point across and hopefully I've done that. Any information that will give me a better idea of what is best and suggestions for doing so is greatly appreciated! Thanks, David -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.7.3 - Release Date: 1/24/2005 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.7.3 - Release Date: 1/24/2005