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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