[macvoiceover] Re: main menu comments about mac and bookshare

Another issue with Bookshare that I have found is that while their books are sort of like DAISY they have very little in the way of navigation in them. So you end up with a book is a single level and paragraphs after that. One of the advantages of DAISY is the navigation which it supports. 

Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
gkearney@xxxxxxxxx

On Feb 29, 2008, at 6:46 PM, Travis Siegel wrote:
I have some serious issues with bookshare, not the least of which is I had a publisher's permission to upload literally hundreds of books to bookshare, their site says that if you have lots of b ooks to upload, to contact them, I did so and was told they have no provissions for uploading multiple books at a time. Their site also says rtf is the preferred format but when talking to them about the uploads, I was told they do not like rtf. 
Get it right folks.
Add to that, the fact that there's absolutely zero quality control, I.E. nobody checks books for consitency, and often allow books markked excellent through that are in fact, nearly unreadable. With those kinds of issues, I have absolutely no use for such a service, especially one I have to pay for every year. So, for me, I honestly don't care one way or the other (putting it nicely) if bookshare works on mac, windows, dos, linux, or nothing at all, it's all the same to me. 



On Feb 28, 2008, at 7:58 PM, David Poehlman wrote:
I think we should all write to darel and let him know what the issues are. I have to say though that by and large, bookshare is aimed at the windows 
crowd.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jude DaShiell" <jdashiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 8:46 PM
Subject: [macvoiceover] Re: main menu comments about mac and bookshare
Those commentators are more commentators than experts. Reality is built on perception. When two or more people get to a common perception then they get to a common reality. The best thing to try to do is for those of 
us on other blindness-connected lists to put a little block in our
.signaturerc files promoting the screenless switchers podcast.



On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
Unfortunately I'm listening to this now instead of live. I was really 
disappointed to hear  comments about the mac.
"Your choices are kind of limited right now. I know there's a kind of 
built-in screen reader type thing in the mac ..."
"Voiceover."
"voiceover, which should sort of work with bookshare books in the
browser?" (emhasis was on "sort of" and the comment sort of ended in a 
question mark).
Mention was made of Kafkas daytime not being up.
Mention was made of later releasing a free daisy payer for mac; mention was made of listening in your browser or notepad (of course there isn't notepad on the mac). One of the commentators did try to stress that these books could easily be turned into html, and while they didn't mention it, of course it's quite easy in text edit to turn them into plaintext if you 
desire.
No mention was made of the fact that these books can easily be turned into audio with text to audio or visiovoice or cspeech (if you have it). I felt that the impression was left that the mac was somehow not a very viable option because you couldn't read bookshare books as daisy on the mac. as Daisy; of course bookshare's version of Daisy isn't audio and is still the 
2002 standard. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I didn't feel the mac was
adequately addressed when answering the question. The tone of voice of one of the two just came across to me as rather derrogatory of the Mac and voiceover, though I know what you hear in tone of voice can be subjective. to be fair, nothing was said about using something like Text aloud in windows either so apparently they weren't even thinking of using any kind of text to audio. Oh, I also didn't think of including dtbmaker though you 
do need to have a working katieplayer for that.
I will also say, though it doesn't really relate to voiceover, that the picture of bookshare painted was extremely positive. I do use bookshare and have gotten many very well-done books from it; I've also gotten many that were rated excellent that had page after page of unreadable material. So my point here is that the presentation was a bit slanted in regard to 
other things besides the Mac.
Of course I know the reasons why the Mac and voiceover are often portrayed as soubtful or suspect options for blind people and there's only so much you can do to change people's oppinions, but it still seems too bad to me that people addressing a large audioence re: accessbility matters can imply by voice tone and incomplete information that voiceover is a poor substitute for a screenreader. I do realize a lot of this is ignorance on the part of people who have not really used this system at all, but it's 
still too bad.


Cheryl

"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also."


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