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E-Books and Audiobooks: What about Their Accessibility?

  • Conference paper
Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6179))

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Abstract

Widespread distribution of electronic book readers, commonly called “e-readers” seems to have taken off seriously over the last year. Although the first e-readers popped up almost twenty years ago, last year’s market appearance of a completely reworked Amazon Kindle 2, a new series of Sony PRS readers and several Bookeen & Cybook devices made e-books quite popular. All of them can store thousands of books, are extremely light weight and very mince. Many of them however present problems for persons with low vision or blindness. We will discuss briefly the situation and possible solutions.

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References

  1. Wikipedia entry for e-ink, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink

  2. The trend figures and numbers collected by the International Digital Publishing Forum can be found at, http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm

  3. This statement is based on fear for piracy. Ironically enough all Harry Potter books have been turned (illegally) into e-books within hours of the release of the printed version, http://www.bradsreader.com/2009/01/jk-rowling-harry-potter-ebooks-and-the-definition-of-irony/

  4. Engelen, J.: Marketing Issues related to Commercial and Specialised Audiobooks, including Digital Daily Newspapers. In: Mornati, S., Hedlund, T. (eds.) ELPUB 2009, Milano, Italy, June 10-12, pp. 621–624 (2009), ISBN 978-88-6134-326-6; Engelen, J.: A Rapidly Growing Electronic Publishing Trend: Audiobooks for Leisure and Education. In: Chan, L., Mornati, S. (eds.) Electronic Publishing Conference - ELPUB 2008, Toronto, June 26-27 (2008), ISBN 978-0-7727-6315-0; Engelen, J.: Modern Digital Libraries, the Case of the Audio-book Boom. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W.L., Karshmer, A.I. (eds.) ICCHP 2008. LNCS, vol. 5105, pp. 284–290. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

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  5. Wikipedia entry for e-book formats, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

  6. Amazon Kindles are described at, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle

  7. Details about the court case Amazon vs ASU can be found in following press message, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blindness-organizations-and-arizona-state-university-resolve-litigation-over-kindle-81131122.html

  8. SQUIDOO publishing platform, lens on the Kindle, http://www.squidoo.com/kindle-for-the-blind

  9. Although the quality of synthetic speech is still far away from human produced speech

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  10. Daisy consortium website, technology references at, http://www.daisy.org/daisy-technology

  11. Daisy 3.0 is in fact an ANSI standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

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  12. Beraud, P.: Produire des documents accessibles avec Microsoft Office 2010 Web Applications, une application "Web 2.0" accessible". Presented at the 4th European eAccessibility Forum: eAccessibility of Public Services in Europe (12-4-2010), http://inova.snv.jussieu.fr/evenements/colloques/colloques/62_Programme_en.html

  13. Daisy consortium website, information on save as daisy, http://www.daisy.org/project/save-as-daisy-openoffice.org

  14. Daisy consortium website, the Daisy online technology is referenced at, http://www.daisy.org/projects/daisy-online-delivery/drafts/20100402/do-spec-20100402.html

  15. Weber, G.: Aufbereitung von E-books ohne Barrieren. In: Proceedings of the Daisy 2009 conference (Leipzig), Published by Th. Kahlisch, German Central Library for the Blind, pp. 247–250 (March 2010)

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  16. Details about the annual Electronic Publishing conferences can be found at, http://www.elpub.net

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Engelen, J. (2010). E-Books and Audiobooks: What about Their Accessibility?. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6179. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14097-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14097-6_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14096-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14097-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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