Creating DAISY audio textbooks and human audio synchronized e-books

A little background

Learning Ally is a nonprofit organization, currently based in Princeton, that is the nation’s largest library of textbooks and educational material available in an accessible audio format.

The organization was founded by Anne T. MacDonald in the late 1940s as Recording for the Blind to assist GIs blinded during World War II.

More background

By the 1990s the organization realized its library could be used by people with print-based disabilities such as dyslexia and renamed itself Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic.

Recognizing a need in the learning disabled community, the organization renamed itself Learning Ally in 2011. As well as providing accessible educational material (not just recordings), it also hopes to become an advocate and clearing house for individuals with print-based disabilities and their parents and teachers.

Even more background

Through 1996’s Chafee Amendment, Learning Ally, like the NLS has the ability to produce copyrighted material in accessible formats for individuals who are blind, visually impaired, or have a print disability. People are only granted access to the library after they have submitted documentation of need for the material.

Where it is…and will be…maybe by the time I’m done typing this…

As I write this, materials are available only in an audio format, with ability to navigate by page, chapter, etc., bookmark, and alter the speed and pitch of the playback. By the time I’m done typing this, that may have changed.

Books that synchronize human audio with text and synthetic audio with text are about to become available. Studies find that human audio is far better than synthetic for younger readers who may be using the books as an intervention to assist in improving reading skills.

Production processes

Since the organization began producing digital audio books in the late 1990s, the process has been to take a book, usually supplied by the publisher, create a pre-coordinated index of page, chapter, synchronization points. A volunteer reader narrates the book, syncing their reading to a navigation point at the beginning of each page, chapter, etc. as they narrate. Page number are announced.

Yes…this is much of what is recorded

What the volunteer sees while recording audio only. (left) What the member sees while

listening on their app. (right)

Narrator hits the Mark button when they want to record the next page or chapter.

Recording is navigable by page, chapter, etc., by tapping.

Coming soon…or maybe already by the time you

see this

The narrator will synchronize each paragraph, as well as each page and chapter, and…

…I couldn’t get a screen shot of a Learning Ally full synchronized text book, but this is pretty much what it will look like on ReadHear software, as well as on the Learning Ally app, pictured earlier. The human audio will be synched to the text and will highlight the paragraph the narrator is reading. The screen shot shows something playing synthetic audio, which is much easier to sync at a more granular level. LA is developing new recording software which will make it easier to sync human audio at a more granular level.

How do the words get on the screen?

For the full text books, hard copies are unbound, scanned, turned into PDFs, and sent overseas to be converted by OCR to XML. Navigation points are added to the XML at the beginnings of paragraphs, pages, chapters, etc. When considering that many of the books that LA records include tables, figures, visuals, etc., and the limitations of OCR (foreign characters, math symbols, etc.), this can be a VERY labor intensive process.

In case you’re thinking, “shouldn’t this be easier…”

Learning Ally adheres to international DAISY consortium guidelines for creating digital talking books. If you want to see a more than capable programmer pull out her hair, have her try to write DAISY-compliant code for 14 year old recording software. (Hence, the development of a new recording platform that allows the creation of more complex DAISY-compliant books. Got $100,000+ of grant money for development of such a tool?)

In case you don’t think there’s competition between nonprofits…

There is a Palo Alto, CA-based organization called Bookshare. It’s volunteers scan books which are then readable by ReadHear or by a computer’s text-to-speech reader. It’s faster (and probably cheaper) to produce, but all synthetic audio. The Dept. of Education pits the organizations against one another for federal funding.