Hi Huw In response to your question regarding the specific magazines...The TNAUK automatic systems produced structured publications but some were better than others and quality varied over the years depending on feed quality and expertise. The golden standard were publications produced by a system developed by Neil MacLachlan a volunteer who started the eText service and gave huge amount of his time to the charity. these include the Economist, The Guardian, The New scientist (with some manual intervention), Money Week, Nature and others. Publication produced by manual extraction such as PC advisor and others were simply a series of articles.
To summarize The TNAUK automatic systems used mostly for the Daily weekly and a number of the magazines produced far superior publications than those produced by the current RNIB automatic system. The output of the RNIB manual extraction system used for some of the magazines is well structured and is superior to the output produced by the manual TNAUK system.
Regards Isaac On 17/05/2014 17:38, Huw Evans wrote:
Thank you, Isaac,I'm very grateful. Life is too short for reading papers as though they were books and RNIB should be persuaded to produce structured publications if they are to provide an acceptable service. Clearly extra costs will be involved and budgets will need to be adjusted, but this is a nettle to be grasped and it calls for expert advice and a grown up discussion rather than guesswork and scaremongering.(Incidentally, I found tnauk's 'economist' had an excellent contents section, while the 'new statesman' did not. Does this mean that the economist was received by tnauk in a form not requiring further treatment.. - I am wondering how much work was actually done by tnauk as they did not appear to touch the statesman).My suspicion is that we are in the present mess because the decision makers did not take fully into account the essential differences between reading books and newspapers and that this failure was then compounded by the marketing strategy which we have witnessed during the past six weeks. I very much hope the new team have been given a reasonably free hand, that they will think afresh and that they will allow the emperor to put on his old clothes.Huw. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Isaac Porat" <isaac@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: <ntnm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2014 7:22 AM Subject: [ntnm] Re: comment on news papers and magazine"improvements"Hi Huw and listIn reply to your question, purely from a technical point of view there are in my mind two main issues:1. Creating by the automatic system well structured publications as opposed to page based publications as they are now. This will allow easier navigation as we were accustom to while reading the TNAUK publications. It should be emphasized that this is independent of the actual format be it HTML epub or text, structure is structure. Of course a structured publication can have page information too for those who wants it as it was with the TNAUK format.2. Supplying The '.doc' TNAUK format.Personally I think well structured publications are essential for efficient and pleasant reading experience. There are however readers with minimal computer skills and for those structure will make little difference if all one knows is to read line by line and perhaps jump from one article to the next.Again personally I will not miss the '.doc' format, moving to well recognized international formats is a good thing of course if there are reading systems out there to take advantage of these. To read HTML in principle all you need is a browser and any text editor will read text of course if these are not well structured than reading is hard work.As I mentioned previously on this thread structuring publications is a lot more difficult than what RNIB is doing at present which means programming investment in the automatic system which costs money and takes time.Deserved or not RNIB is known for 'top down, we know what is good for you approach. Will the survey be an exercise in political correctness or a genuine attempt to resolve the problem I don't know. However, there is a new top management in the media and solutions sections lets see what they can do.Regards Isaac n 16/05/2014 21:44, Huw Evans wrote:Hi Isaac,I'm wondering whether there are any technical (non-financial) reasons why RNIB cannot provide the service we were accustomed to get from Tnauk and whether you are prepared tocomment on this.My belief is that recent events have established that our needs as newspaper and magazine readers differ fundamentally from our needs when reading books and that distinct separate non procrustean arrangements are needed for providing a satisfactory service. Now that our needs are more clearly understood, I have no doubt that the RNIB would be concerned to provide us with such an obviously valuable service and that it would be an wonderful complement to the talking books service.I believe the coming May consultation exercise should be regarded as part of the planning procedure and that all users should be given an opportunity to consider all options (i.e. including the tnauk type presentation). RnIB should then be prepared to go back to the drawing board, obtain any necessary expert advice and make appropriate adjustments to allocations of resources and budgets.Huw. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Isaac Porat" <isaac@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: <ntnm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 9:33 AM Subject: [ntnm] Re: comment on news papers and magazine"improvements"HiI was involved with the TNAUK computer systems as a volunteer so I have some knowledge how these things work...You are right and wrong.Most of the newspapers and very few magazines come from the association NLA feed so in theory (and mostly in practice) they can be produced like sausages automatically and therefore cheap to produce.Most of the magazines are complex, have lots of none relevant graphics, come in complex formats and need to be produced manually and therefore there is a cost (if I remember correctly 2 - 4 hours) each to produce.Going back to the NLA automatic system, producing publications properly structured with sections is more complex; for a start not all publications specify the section information in a uniform way (some don't) so a lot more effort is required to develop and maintain such a system. Like many people on this list I agree that this is essential.Regards Isaac On 15/05/2014 17:53, Derek Hornby wrote:The strange thing is though, whether there a just few Subscribers to a publication, or few hundred, the costs are same! So this brings us to an interesting point. We pay £39 a year, and can have as many publication as we want. Should we pay according to how many publications we subscribe to? If we are to be equal to sighted world, should we not pay Same cover price as the sighted! Regards, Derek -----Original Message-----From: ntnm-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ntnm-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On BehalfOf Mark Kirkham Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 5:31 PM To: ntnm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [ntnm] Re: comment on news papers and magazine"improvements"And hardly the greatest surprise is that we have already seen the RNIB about to discontinue some minority titles. I've just had an email informing me that the Wisden Cricketer is to go due to lack of subscribers. And don't youjust love that email address they use to send emails: Mailbox, RNIB solutions - oh how amusing! Mark
