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Gerald Schmidt
Learning and Teaching Solutions
The Open University
Producing DAISY talking bookswithout manual intervention
Open Educational Resources in the mainstream• OpenLearn is about to join the university’s central VLE platform
• As OpenLearn and OU courses share a single production schema, all
features available to our accredited courses will also be available to
OpenLearn
• Pizza effect: many of these features were in fact first implemented by
OpenLearn
Open Educational Resources in the mainstream• OpenLearn is about to join the university’s central VLE platform
• As OpenLearn and OU courses share a single production schema, all
features available to our accredited courses will also be available to
OpenLearn
• Pizza effect: many of these features were in fact first implemented by
OpenLearn
Single input, multiple outputs
Content creation
Automated production
What happens next?• Metadata is extracted and added as DAISY and Dublin Core information
• Images are converted and resized
• Audio and video is copied across and embedded in the document
• All textual content is recorded using a synthetic voice
• DAISY Pipeline turns the source document into a full DAISY talking book
DAISY talking books
DAISY talking books: strengths• Unparalleled accessibility
• Synchronised speech and full text
• Structure matches the original document exactly
• Excellent hardware support
DAISY talking books: challengesFor traditional print items• Considerable file sizes (in some cases 500MB+)• No standard file extension (distributed as folder wrapped in zip archive)
• Streaming not yet available
• Limited cross-platform support
For media-rich content• No support for audio, video, Ajax, Flash• The guiding metaphor is the printed book
Choices• In order to do justice to the mix of photos, audio, video, interactivity and
textual content in OpenLearn, it is necessary to offer additional outputs
• Once an automated process is in place, adding further outputs is
inexpensive and quick
• At the time of writing, these are:
– Audio books
– ePub (e-ink)
– ePub (HTML5)
– Mobipocket
– Microsoft Word
Audio books• Commuter car journey scenario
• Support for multi-lingual documents
• Interpreting tables
• MP3 files tagged with album, artist and track information
ePub ebook (e-ink)• Broad industry backing
– Sony Reader
– Barnes & Noble Nook
– Many other reader e-ink devices are set to go on sale this year
– Most can display ePub files
ePub ebook (HTML5)• The next generation of ePub enabled devices is likely to offer colour touch
screens, highly optimised JavaScript engines and key features of HTML5,
notably:
– Embedded audio
– Embedded video
– Canvas
Mobipocket ebook• This is essentially a variation on the ePub theme, only the supported
device is Amazon’s Kindle
• Text-to-speech support is excellent
Microsoft Word• This is the preferred accessible format for many students with disabilities
• Close integration with Jaws and Window-Eyes screen-reader software
• Editing and sharing Word documents is easier for most students than just
about any other format
Existing OpenLearn outputs• Focus on open standards
• Reuse in VLE contexts
• Structured materials for large scale production
General availability of DAISY and other formats• The university-wide roll-out begins in June
• Alternative outputs for OpenLearn are set to go live in September
• All tools used are open source software