|
|
 A
link to
navigation |
|
Part II: For Visually Impaired People, A New Chapter in Reading Has DawnedBy Penny Reeder On the “Stream,” there’s a digital talking book, “Tender at the Bone, Growing Up at the Table,” by Ruth Reichl. My book club read Reichl’s “Garlic and Sapphires” last year, and my means for listening to the book was a held-together-by-packing-tape 4-track, half-speed audiocassette player, which is how books from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) have arrived since sometime in the 1980s. I am looking forward to accessing “Tender at the Bone,” which is read aloud by one of NLS’ best narrators, via the file I recently downloaded from the NLS Web site. The Stream is a cute little, easily understood MP3 player, about the size of a deck of cards, that fits easily into a pocket or purse and even features a sleep timer so you don’t get completely discombobulated in a book should you fall asleep while listening to a narrator or the synthesized voice that makes text and DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) files accessible. On my Stream’s memory card are “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” by Bill Buford, “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini. The card also holds a book about the history of The Washington Post, which a friend scanned into the Kurzweil program for translation into an accessible format. I promised to edit it so we could share it with the other members of our book club. I’m about halfway through. After lunch, I (virtually) attended an online training seminar on the topic of downloading unabridged digital books using the Overdrive software console. Apparently, if my state’s library system subscribes to this accessible technology project, I will be able to access current audio books, via digital download. These are the same audio books on the racks at Borders and Barnes and Noble, which library patrons have been reserving since our county library procured them from the publishers. I may soon be able to “borrow” them without having to leave home, take a bus to the library, or add my name to the “reserved” list. If my library is a subscriber to the service, I can listen to the books via my computer. Each book disappears after two weeks, which is analogous to the typical time period for checking out a hard-copy library book. Or I can copy the digital files to an MP3 player, or burn them to a CD for future listening. I’m sure you realize by now just exactly how food obsessed I am, and more to the point of this article, how book obsessed I am becoming. My Stream, my BrailleNote, my computer, my scanner, even my phone – and my postal mailbox too, for I still receive Martha Stewart Living in hard-copy Braille – are all delivering books and magazines and newspapers and other printed materials almost faster than I can list them. What a wealth of riches I have to enjoy! My only problem is how to find the time to read everything that is finally available to me – and still go to work, write the occasional article, interact with my family, and indulge in my passions for food and cooking. What a delightful quandary to find myself entangled within! In a future issue, I will list some resources and tell you how to access your own wealth of printed materials. I will try to decode the assistive-technology jargon and include Web sites and contact information so that you too can begin accumulating a collection of accessible books, magazines and other media. Your own digital collection may truly be just a few keystrokes away. *******************************Penny Reeder lives in Montgomery Village, Md. She became blind as consequence of Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP). She and her husband are the parents of six children and the grandparents of three. |
  |
|
|
ABOUT US: Contact InformationEditorial TeamTermsContributorsSubmissions ADERTISING: Opportunities Classified Informercial' Underwriters ARCHIVES: Archived Issues Cover Stories Features MARKET PLACEAdvertisers Products ServicesSubscriptions MISCELANEOUS: More NewsLinks'FeedbackPolls SEARCH: Web site Internet',Donate |
Copyright © 2008 by ILCHV |
