[bksvol-discuss] Re: Need Help to Confirm Bug In Bookshare Tools
- From: "EVAN REESE" <mentat3@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:50:08 -0400
No, they don't know about it because nobody has mentioned it yet, and I have
only just posted about it because I just learned of it.
I'm still investigating some other books, and so I'm not prepared to say how
extensive the problem is.
One possibility is that it may only occur under certain circumstances, such as
extended passages of italicized text, which is where we definitely confirmed
the two instances I posted about. It may not occur anywhere else. I haven't had
a chance to check that much yet. So it may not be as bad as all that. The
passages in the other books where I saw this problem did not have italics, but
until fairly recently, italics in braille didn't show up, so the passages might
have been italicized and I wouldn't know it. But I wanted to ask some others if
they would mind checking a few recent proofreadings of their own to see if the
problem shows up there. If it does, then we can make note of where it occurs,
and perhaps of where it doesn't to try to get a handle on what is going on. If
it only occurs, say in passages of extended italics, then it is still something
that it would be nice to fix, but not nearly as big a problem as it would be if
it is occurring in other places.
I just want to try to find out.
Evan
----- Original Message -----
From: Kim Friedman
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 9:46 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Need Help to Confirm Bug In Bookshare Tools
Hi, Evan, Kim here. That's awful! To me, it seems rotten if the Bookshare
tools are in effect sabotaging the work of scanners and proofreaders. Do the
folks at Bookshare know about this? They really should. Regards and best of
luck, Kim aka Ellinder.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of EVAN REESE
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:26 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Need Help to Confirm Bug In Bookshare Tools
Hello All,
Lissi and I have discovered that in one recent book we did, errors were
introduced by the Bookshare processing that were not in the original rtf
submission. These errors take the form of words being split, often in strange
places--that is, not between syllables. I was checking the quality of a recent
book we did and discovered that the word "girl" appeared in one place as "gi
rl", and the word "will" appeared as "w ill". That was in just the first few
pages. It seems likely that more of these will appear if I keep reading. We
checked Lissi's proofread rtf file, and neither of these errors were there. I
had seen this odd word splitting in some other books, some of which I was
thinking of rescanning, and just assumed they were scannoes that were not
noticed by the proofreader. (I'm sure that many of you know that lots of books
get into the collection without a REAL proofreading, even now.) It never
occurred to me until today that these errors would come from Bookshare's tools.
It was a bit of a shock, in fact.
Lissi did mention that when she has clicked on the link for misspellings when
checking in a book, she has sometimes seen letter groupings tagged as errors
that she was not able to find in the rtf file, so she was unable to correct
them. When she was not able to find the misspellings in the file, she ignored
them, figuring that Bookshare was just wrong. That is not as strange a position
to take is it may sound, since Bookshare cannot even give a consistent word
count on the submission form!
I use brf files, but if these errors are being introduced before braille
translation, then they would probably appear in the Daisy version of the book
as well.
We plan to check some of our other books to see how prevalent this problem
is, but we can at least say for certain that the Bookshare tools introduced
errors in at least this book that were not in the file that was checked back in
after proofreading. It seems very unlikely that this particular book would be
unique. If this happened to this book, then it is likely happening to others.
That's what we want your help with. We would be very grateful if some of you
out there would be willing to check a proofreading or two of your own and see
if this problem exists in those books. I think it would be best to check
proofreading's, not submissions, to eliminate the possibility of errors that
might have crept in between submission and proofreading. I know this may take a
bit of time, since not only do you need to find any split words, but then you
need to compare the Bookshare version with the original rtf file so that it can
be shown that those errors are not in the file that was checked back in to
Bookshare. It is probably best to check the most recent proofreading's to
ensure that any problems you discover were not the result of tools that have
been superseded. The book we found these split words in was added to the
collection on June 18. On the other hand, I don't think that huge numbers of
examples need to be found in each book. If just a few examples are identified
in several recently added books, that should be enough evidence to prove that
the Bookshare tools are adding these errors. Maybe, if a few more people can
confirm this, we can get it looked into.
Thanks a lot for any help in this investigation. It's a little disappointing
to think that those of us who do our very best to get the highest quality books
into the collection might be having our work degraded by a software glitch of
some kind. We're hoping to get some confirmation of this particular glitch so
we can quash it as soon as possible to ensure the best reading experience for
readers. I know most of you here agree on that, otherwise you probably wouldn't
be subscribed.
Thanks again for helping us check into this if you can.
Evan
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