[bksvol-discuss] Re: Awesome - 151,663 Titles on Bookshare

  • From: "Martha Rafter" <mlhr@xxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2012 21:17:41 -0400

Hi Folks,
I know that what I am saying here is not really on topic, but I have to say that I am very proud to be a volunteer for an organization such as Bookshare. Judy, I'm so, so, so glad for you! 
Marty
-----Original Message----- From: Judy s. 
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 6:42 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Awesome - 151,663 Titles on Bookshare

Ali, that's a great example of how much a description adds to a book.
Thank you! I want to have descriptions of images in every book. It's one
of the reasons why as a sighted volunteer I've tried to do descriptions
as much as I can. But as a sighted member, it's just fantastic to
suddenly have images in books again that I can look at myself, to
enhance my own reading experience.

Even the choices of topics for the print disabled have been geared
almost entirely towards making accessible books that are accessible for
the blind, with what I can only describe as "censoring" as to what the
population of print disabled gets overall, and more so when it comes to
subgroups of the print disabled who aren't blind, or who are both blind
and deaf.

In the past the organizations that provide books for the print disabled
have focused pretty much exclusively on what they've viewed as the needs
of the blind print disabled. These organizations didn't have any call
(from their perspective) to put their efforts towards producing, for
example, accessible versions of books on photography much less books on
photography with images in them.  But for the sighted reader, seeing
those images is critical to understand, in a book on photography, what
the author is trying to teach or demonstrate about a skill that relies
on the visual senses. In the last 18 months Bookshare has added at least
25 publisher quality books on photography that have the original images
in them included. It feels like being plucked from a desert island and
getting dropped inside a candy shop.

I do feel that in a different fashion the folks who are deaf and blind
both have had their choices limited, too.  Organizations like the NLS
produce mostly audio books, with relatively few braille books (either
printed or electronic) to choose from.  In terms of how many there are,
similar to the group of sighted but print disabled people, there aren't
that many people who are both blind and deaf. So like us they kind of
exist on the fringe, getting accessible version of only some of the
stuff, basically a subset of the titles that are available to the blind.
And of course the blind have only gotten a subset of the books that are
available to everyone who isn't print disabled.  Bookshare's approach,
towards making all printed material accessible to all, really resonates
with me because of that.  When a book becomes available, it's available
in forms that are accessible to the sighted disabled, the blind
disabled, and the blind plus deaf disabled, with Bookshare working
towards making content within those that currently isn't accessible more
accessible in the future.  It's great.

Judy


On 6/22/2012 5:00 PM, Ali Al-hajamy wrote:
It may sound odd, but even as a blind participant who has never had sight of any sort, illustrations are important to me because I read many fictions which use illustrations in an effort to produce a certain desired effect with pictures, and even just knowing what is on the page is enough to get me involved enough in the book to feel the effect they're trying to accomplish. Two examples are The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, and The Tunnel, by William H. Gass. In the former case, at one point, the main character falls out of a ship and into water, and a giant shark made entirely of words and information (it's complicated) begins to swim through the water twoards him. For maybe forty pages, the picture of the shark is printed on the page, and it keeps getting larger and larger. Because each page had a description of the shark swimming twoards the character, growing with each page, my experience of the book was more enhanced than if I didn't have those descriptions. My reaction to the rest of the book was mixed, but that was one trick which I thought worked very well. It was hilarious and terrifying at the same time. 

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