[bksvol-discuss] Summary Of Chat With Jake Brownell

  • From: Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Bookshare Volunteers <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bookshare Discuss <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:32:38 -0500

Hi, everyone. Last Tuesday, long-time volunteer and current Bookshare staff member Jake Brownell met with members of the Friends Of Bookshare community to answer some questions and give us some hints about what we might expect in the future. During this question and answer session, we learned that Bookshare is hard at work on a new and greatly improved tool that will help to make books more navigable and make book validation easier for everyone. The completion date for the new validation tool hasn't been announced yet since they are still deciding about the best way to implement each new feature. Jake did tell us that he believes that the existing collection of books will be processed with the new tool so there will be uniformity in formatting. The tool known as the stripper will be updated as well so it will do a better job of handling headers and page numbers. This news was greeted with excitement and cheers.



One especially exciting topic of discussion was the improvement in the quality of books in the Bookshare collection. Jake said that there are now approximately 1,400 books rated fair among Bookshare's collection of over 35,000 books. This figure has remained fairly constant over the past year, indicating that Bookshare volunteers and staff are doing a great job of replacing poorly scanned books and making sure most new book submissions are in great shape. Jake gave Claire a list of the most downloaded fair rated books, and she is looking at ways to get those books rescanned. Volunteers who scan and validate BSO copies of books are steadily chipping away at the number of poor quality books in the collection. For a list of books needing to be rescanned, visit Jake's website at http://www.jbrownell.com . Then please check the Bookshare site and/or this list to see if anyone else is already working on that BSO so we don't duplicate our efforts.

Jake went on to let us know that he would help us understand how the tools work now so we can get the best from them. We learned that when we upload an rtf file we have validated, it is converted to an xml file that is used to make both the daisy and braille files. Because of this, we can leave fonts in our files as they have been scanned since the end user can adjust fonts to his/her liking in the daisy reader they use. For ease in reading, we can reduce the size of extremely large fonts, above 48 points, so our assistive technology will read them correctly. Moving these huge point sizes down to 14 or 16 points will make the text easier to read with a screenreader. We also learned that text that is bolded in our original file will show up as bolded in the daisy format and that there is some support for bold text in the brf files as well. There are some inconsistencies in the Braille format, and those are going to be addressed in the new validation tool. Because of future improvements in the conversion tool, volunteers are asked to leave such things as elipses and long dashes intact as they appear in the print book. This will allow future tools to identify these symbols and convert them to Braille correctly. Adopting this strategy now will help to build the infrastructure for tomorrow's technology.

A new Bookshare member asked about using the VictorSoft reader with the daisy format of Bookshare titles. We discussed how the lack of knowledge of this program among volunteers and Bookshare members makes it difficult for us to help new Bookshare members. It was suggested that we find a knowledgeable person to conduct a training session for anyone interested in learning how to use the software. If volunteers learn how the software works, we will be able to help new members more effectively. We might also find that we like how it reads daisy files once we understand how it works. If you know this product well and would like to help with training, please email Pat Price at pat@xxxxxxxxxxxx .

A revised version of the Bookshare manual is on its way, expected after the beginning of the new year. If you have suggestions to share, please email vmfeedbakc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx . These emails will go to both Jake and John to be sorted and considered for the upcoming edition of the manual.

Thanks, Jake, for your time and for answering our questions with clarity and a smile. We appreciate you.

Monica Willyard

Other related posts:

  • » [bksvol-discuss] Summary Of Chat With Jake Brownell