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