Dear Susan,I'm so lucky that you've offered to help. What you've been doing is just the kind of help I need. I'll be in touch with you, Courtney and Chella off list. With you to back me up, I'll feel much better about describing pictures and won't take so much time doing it. I think editorial double checking and blind reader inspection are invaluable!
Proofing, staying true to the text is easier for me. I can relax when I'm not inserting any of my own input, except sometimes to improve long and short synopses. Those are the fun books for me.
But, with your kind of help, and Evan's great scanning of these sometimes tricky-to-scan books, we may be able to make more completely accessible children's books available!!! With Cindy, Jamie, Valerie and others, our Booksharian kids have many more reading treats in store!!!
One more thing you and anyone interested might do is to browse the collection for books in need of picture description.
In the meantime I have well over 100 picture books for kids preschool through about 8th grade here from used book sales which aren't in the collection we can tackle.
poor Evan is on a trip. I can hear the roar when he catches up on his e-mail! With his opticon and messing with k1000 settings He has really worked on producing good scans of picture books with irregular margins and contrast problems. He's going to wonder if he should have kept his light under a bushel!
Always with Love on yet another productive day, Lissi----- Original Message ----- From: "Susan" <slumpkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 3:46 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Image Descriptions in Children's Books
Hi Lissi, I would reword some of Grandma Cindy's descriptions and together we woulddetermine whether they were clear or not! I'd love to help you if you like!You might want to communicate direclty with her to let her add her part to this! Susan -----Original Message----- From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Estelnalissi Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 2:21 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Image Descriptions in Children's Books Dear Courtney and Susan,Thank you so much for your offers! I wouldn't be overwhelming either of youwith work because I don't do huge quantities of books because of my vision limitations. I have to move to tasks like regular proofreading which don't require vision when eye fatigue from studying illustrations sets in. I do try and reserve one book in my 5 book queue for a children's book which needs picture descriptions because as a very low vision child, reading braille and talking books, I wondered if there were pictures and what they showed. As a teacher, I couldn't see pictures fast enough to describe them as Iread, so each day I chose a different child from the class to describe them.I always thought that blind parents might be frustrated about not knowing the picture descriptions of picture books they read in braille to their pre-schoolers.If an author and publisher agree illustrations are important, then I feel itis a plus for blind readers to know what is going on in the pictures, especially when they contain details not covered in the text.Back to your offers. Courtney, I'd love feedback for improvements I can make in wording,, not too many words, grammar, and clarity. I'm reading a book by an author who thanked his editor for helping him say in three words what hesaid in five, so to speak. Susan, What kind of help did you give Cindy? If there were two volunteerswilling to help me, I could alternate between you or see who had the time tohelp as I finished a book. Since readers are individuals, I realize some would like more description and others like less. All I know to do on that count is mark the beginning and end of descriptions so readers can skip them. I used to put a simpleexplanation of my description format as a readers note at the beginning of abook. I have also thought it would be good to put the description after the text that it illustrates instead of at the top or bottom of the page. Puttingdescriptions at the tops and bottoms of pages usually puts them out of sincwith the text, interrupting sentences and ideas. I have pages that illustrate that, too. Thanks for your quick, generous answers! Always with love, Lissi To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list ofavailable commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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