Have you talked to the DAISY Consortium. They do have some assistance for
developing countries, and it is what you want. It is becoming a worldwide
standard in the blind community, so why re-invent the wheel?
Dave
At 11:13 PM 11/6/2003 +0500, you wrote:
>I'm a volunteer working in Kyrgyzstan with the blind and the deaf. We
>want to develope digital audio books and courses that can then be
>inexpensively duplicated on CDs for distribution to other parts of the
>country or the CIS. For example, the Kyrgyz School for the Blind has
>over 20,000 reel to reel tapes of books in Russian, some of which could
>be copied into digital format for use on CD or MP3 players or on
>computers. Many of these could be distributed for the cost of the CD and
>postage.
>
>I'm working with the Kyrgyzstan National Library for the Blind and the
>National School for the Blind trying to develope an audio-book software
>program (and library) into which we could plug these different audio
>texts so that a listener could hear an index and then go to any desired
>title, or subtitle or page, and go forward or backward within the page,
>or book, or among books.
>
>1) Do you know of such software programs?
>
>2) If so, is there an internationally accepted standard or format for
>these?
>
>3) Is there a place where I could download such a software player into
>which we could insert Russian audio (and text) indexes and files?
>
>I'm looked into the DAISY standard, but there are not any former Soviet
>countries using that yet, and the $2,500 price tag for DAISY Consortium
>membership is out of reach in a country where university professors earn
>$10 per month and they haven't yet found the funds to repair the CD drive
>on one of the school's two computers that are modern enough to have one
>:-)
>We're somewhat technically (economically) challenged here.
>
>So we're trying ourselves to develope a program but would rather find a
>basic but navigatable semi-standardized shell into which we can put our
>.wav or .mp3 files for CD players. If the same program (on CD) could
>also autorun when placed in a computer CD drive, that would be the best.
>(If later we can get text-and-audio, like the DAISY standard, that will
>be wonderful too.)
>
>I'll appreciate any input. Jon <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
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See EASI Special October Bonus offer at http://easi.cc/clinic.htm
EASI November courses are:
Barrier-free E-learning, Accessible Internet Multimedia and Business Benefits of Accessible IT Design:
http://easi.cc/workshop.htm
EASI Home Page http://www.rit.edu/~easi
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