EASI 4-part Webinar Series:
Better E-books with DAISY, EPUB, and More
Week 2: Tools for authoring and reading DAISY documents
Presenter: Jeff Bazer from Dolphin Computer Access in the US
April 17, 2012
Norm COOMBS: Good morning, everybody, welcome back to second webinar about Dolphin reading and writing tools with Jeff Bazer. We have some other free webinars coming up this month you might be interested in. Thursday of this week we are hosting a webinar by the DAISY Consortium, and on Saturday of this week we are doing one with people from Canada on free and inexpensive software. And you can read about those and register for them by going to our webpage, our webinar page, I should say. So if you go to our website, easi.cc, and look for our webinar page, you will find them there.
So no more promotions at this point, I want to turn the presentation over to my friend Jeff Bazer, and I'm sure his mellifluous voice will keep you entertained for the hour. Jeff, it is yours.
JEFF BAZER: Good morning and good afternoon everybody. Norm, thank you so much. It is good to be back for week number two in a row. I really enjoyed being here last week, and good to see some of the same folks back this week, and maybe some new folks as well.
I need to ask one question, Norm, and this is something I did not think about before. Right at the end of the presentation last week we previewed what we are going to do this week by playing a video about EasyConverter and how the program works and how we are actually able to move through and create a DAISY talking book from a PDF -- actually, we showed a couple of different methods there in order to do that. One of the most popular ways is taking a PDF file, but it does not have to be a PDF it can be a number of different types of files.
So Norm, I have to ask -- do we have the means to play that video again or are we just set up this week for the EasyReader Express video that we also want to play?
PROF. COOMBS: We are set up at the moment for the Express. I will see if I can get it set up for both, and I will let you know in maybe 10 minutes, or do you want to play it now?
JEFF BAZER: I think it's fine. Why don't we just go with the EasyReader Express one, I think that will be fine. Don't worry about doing the other one.
Basically what I want to do to begin is to review a little bit about last week but spend most of the time moving forward and introducing you to some of the products we have at Dolphin that allow you to create the Easy talking books, or digital talking books, as people say a lot of the time. Digital does not mean DAISY, in fact, so let's change it to DAISY talking books. How about that?
We talked about DAISY a lot last week, introducing you to the concept of it and the final structure that is comprised of DAISY, telling you about what it is. Basically, it is a set of files that, once put together correctly, make up a digital talking book with enhanced navigation capabilities beyond what you might find in other digital textbooks. DAISY gives us the ability to navigate by chapter, by sentence, by paragraph, by section of the book, and by page number. It depends on how the book is, quote, "marked up," or how it is made up as part of the DAISY creation.
Some folks to do this on a regular basis -- and depending on the type of book they are working with -- may be sure that they have a page number navigation set up. If it is reference or study material where we know a professor or a teacher is going to say at some point, "I need you to reference specific pages in this book," like turn to page 32 or whatever, if you have a Dolphin Player that allows page number navigation -- and most of them do -- the most important thing would need to be the player would support it -- is the book set up with page number navigation and place? If the answer is yes, than what the user of the DAISY talking book would be able to do at that point is press a couple of buttons, enter the page number, and be right where it his sighted counterparts were who were using the hardcopy book. So it is dynamic from that standpoint as to what DAISY can offer.
Let's go little further but talk about not only navigation -- of course, navigation is extremely important, because if we go back to the old cassette player days when you had a textbook or notes on a cassette tape, if it was long you might need to get tape number three or four out, and if you had to find chapter 22 it might be in the middle of that cassette tape. It might take 10 to 15 minutes to figure out where that is. If you get tired of listening to the double in-text tones for the chapter, page number with the single tones and missed were you were, you could fall asleep before you found out where you needed to be. So navigation -- I really cannot stress enough how easy it now is, how important it is, and how completely state-of-the-art it is compared to what we used to have the do with the cassette tapes.
Let's take that one step further and talk about bookmarking. That is a capability DAISY has as well. So if you have important material in your book that you need to come back to, not only can you find the page number or the chapter that it was in, but we can drop bookmarks in along the way, kind of like turning over the corner of the page back in the day in a printed book. We can do the same thing with DAISY. And even better, we can add notes to the bookmark almost like you were writing in the margin or the side of the page in a hardcopy book. We can do that with audio and with text. In other words, we can record almost like a tape recorder to say 'this is important information that will be on the test, study this before the test' -- or if we wanted to write some text notes in, maybe reference exactly what the material is about -- at that point when we need to come back to it, we can bring up our list of bookmarks -- if we have several, 12 or 13 -- based on the text that you wrote in, you would then have the ability to locate the proper bookmark you are looking for.
The nice thing about this is that the hardware side of things, hardware players, when you put your CD back in or your SD card back in and start your DAISY talking book, the player remembers where these bookmarks were. So even if you created them a while ago and you are now coming back, the player remembers where the bookmarks were.
Same thing on the software side for your computer. When you open up the DAISY talking book, the bookmarks are remembered. So you don't have to worry about did I save them, I rebooted my machine or turned off my player, will the bookmarks be saved? The answer is absolutely.
But to clarify what I mean by hardware and software players. One of the places where there is a series of players listed is in Wikipedia. If you go to Wikipedia and type in DAISY, d-a-i-s-y, an acronym that stands for digital access information system, there is about 21 different software players listed there. The hardware list is somewhat less comprehensive, only about four or five.
Another place you can go is on the DAISY Consortium's website, www.daisy.org, and they listed some of these websites last week for your reference. Let me give you that website again, www.daisy.org. The DAISY Consortium is an organization that has actually been around for about 17 years, 16 or 17 years. It was formed in 1996, and it is an organization who maintain the standards for DAISY. 2.02, the first version, was in 2001. It was updated in 2005 with DAISY 3, the current standard.
A lot of you may have heard of EPUB as a new type of digital talking book. It is very likely that DAISY and EPUB 3 are going to be one and the same or very similar in the coming months and years, so if you have heard about EPUB and you are thinking is DAISY still going to be around, absolutely. These are two very similar types of talking books, and the standards for both are much the same.
Let's talk about the three different types of DAISY before we start getting into some of the solutions that we offer at Dolphin. There are basically three different types of ways that these DAISY talking books can be delivered. We can do it as strictly audio -- in other words, much like the old cassette tapes where you turn them on and you hear the narrator reading to you. That is audio only. Most commonly found in the United States from Learning Ally, formally RSBND, and also from NLS, the National Library Service. These are delivered on a couple of different hardware types -- the NLS delivers on cartridge or being able to download from the site, and I think with Learning Ally it is a CD or being able to download from the website. They may have changed that now, but the last I knew that is how they delivered.
Basically, that is one of the most common types available now, the audio only. Again, the difference being that this audio has navigation built-in. All of the digital navigation that we talked about -- being able to navigate by section, chapter, page number, being able to bookmark, all capabilities with any type of DAISY that we have.
The next is text only. Listen to or being able to be heard with synthesized speech. If you think of a screen reader and the synthesized speech that you hear, those voices are getting better and better all the time, and a lot of the Dolphin Players now come with their own built-in synthesized speech to be able to read text-only DAISY to you. Most commonly found on the bookshelf website at this point in the United States, www.bookshare.org. They have hundreds of thousands of leisure reading and textbooks available, and so far those are delivered in text-only DAISY format.
Then we have DAISY that is both text and audio. What I mean by that is narrated audio, something that you might find similarly on Learning Ally or the NLS. In other words, it is an actual person reading the book. But these books that I'm referring to now include text as well. Particularly important on the software side, when you are looking at this with a computer and the screen, because not only then can you hear the audio but then you also have the text so you can follow along. So for somebody who is low vision or has another print disability such as dyslexia, this text and audio is dynamic. And let me reiterate that the text-only that I mentioned, the second type of DAISY that I mentioned a moment ago, when I say text-only you have the audio from the synthesized speech as well. So you are able to listen to it and see it on screen if you have a software player that runs on a computer with a computer screen, or a hardware play with a screen as well.
What I'm trying to tell you is that this is a dynamic format with lots of different capabilities. And some of the biggest advantages of DAISY being that you have a multimodal approach, you have text that you can listen to and also see on the screen at the same time.
The nice thing about being able to see the text on screen as well -- this is not actually a capability of DAISY itself, but it is a capability in the players -- for example, with our software player from Dolphin called EasyReader, you can listen to the text and see it on screen as well. Then we can magnify it, magnify the size of the text. We can change the color of the text and the background as well. So it is great for lots of different light conditions.
The other thing that is extremely important to let you know is that as you are reading the textbook, for example, you are listening to it being read and watching the text on the screen -- it is being highlighted as it is on the screen. You have a highlight bar going across the screen and words or maybe the entire paragraph, depending on how the book is set up, but usually if it is synthesized text each word is being highlighted as it is being read. Is a great way for you to be able to follow along with exactly what is being read. You don't have to worry about getting lost because each word or each series of words is being highlighted as it is being read.
Hopefully this all makes sense. It is a lot of information to throw at you at once, and I know we do not have a lot of props to visually be able to take a look at this.
Before I get into the programs from Dolphin and demonstrating them, I want to remind you where you can go to find these programs and try them out for yourself. Download them and get a 30 day demo, or you can also call Dolphin and get one sent to you on CD. So let's do that. Our website is www.yourDolphin.com. www.yourDolphin.com. If you go to that website and then click on Products, everything we offer at Dolphin is displayed. And if you go to alternative formats, you will find our different offerings for DAISY. You will see EasyConverter, you will see EasyProducer, you will see Dolphin Publisher, and you will also see EasyReader. The EasyReader is our Dolphin Player. It is actually called our accessible e-book player because it supports EPUB as well, but that is a player we offer from Dolphin for you to read DAISY.
It doesn't have to be DAISY that was created with Dolphin products. This is compatible with any other DAISY that you find on the Internet as well, and may be produced using some of the free programs out there from the DAISY Consortium and others. So the Dolphin Player from Dolphin is compatible with any DAISY that you find on the Internet.
Any of these programs you can download and test for 30 days, uninterrupted, and it is a fully functional program. So you don't have to worry that it might run out on you after you use it for an hour or two and you are just getting into it, saying 'boy, I really like this.' No, you can use it for 30 days uninterrupted and be able to try out the program and all of its features. And that is not only with EasyReader but with all of the Dolphin products you might want to try.
Now let's talk about a couple of the different programs we offer for DAISY production, because I want to make this clear so that if this is something you want to learn more about or are trying to get into to do with your college or university or organization, hopefully you will get the right tool for your use. And if you forget some of this today, if you take anything away from this webinar I want you to remember two things. You can call me or e-mail me at any time and ask questions. You can tell me I didn't explain something very well, and I have questions. Then tell me which program will be best for me. That is number one.
The second thing is if you ever want to see these products demonstrated on screen -- in other words, you can sit in your office or your room and see them come to life, see my desktop on your computer, we do allow that capability as well. And it is free of charge. So you and I can do a webinar at any time when you can see this program and see me go through the process of producing a DAISY talking book.
Hopefully that gets the introductory material out of the way. And before I go to the products and start distinguishing the differences between them, does anybody have a question they would like to ask right now?
MARISOL MIRANDA: We have nothing on the text chat.
JEFF BAZER: Okay, that's fine, I just like to give you the opportunity to do that before you forget your question and we get too far into this, and since we have about 11 people here, this is a small enough group that your question might be being thought about by others as well. So I wanted to give you that opportunity.
So let's distinguish some of the differences between the offerings we have at Dolphin computer access. By the way, I'm the sales manager at Dolphin, and I've been here for almost 3 years now. I mentioned that on the webinar last time, but I know there are some of you who are new here today. So hopefully you will think that I'm qualified to talk you about our Dolphin products. Maybe nothing else, but… [LAUGHTER]
We do have a number of different programs. The first one, and our flagship product that we have, the one that I'm actually going to talk with you about most, is EasyConverter. That is a product that allows us to produce DAISY from a number of different source files. So if you want to derive the DAISY talking book from a PDF file, from a Word document, from HTML, maybe even a [INAUDIBLE] file -- if you have legacy [INAUDIBLE] files and you are trying to get them into a different format like DAISY -- we have that capability with EasyConverter.
The other products we have -- I will touch on this quickly -- some folks use EasyProducer. EasyProducer is simply an add-in for Microsoft Word. It goes on the Word toolbar and it gives you the ability to produce DAISY from Microsoft Word documents. That's it. Great little program, but somewhat limited in the fact that you have to be in Microsoft Word in order to produce the DAISY. So if you are talking about a PDF or a [INAUDIBLE] file or HTML or something else, you had better find a way to get it into a Word document before you convert it to DAISY using EasyProducer. This is a very inexpensive product at about $249, and allows you -- as I said -- it is convenient that if you use Word regularly, you can get your documents into DAISY products quickly. So a lot of folks use that.
The top-end of our DAISY production tools is something called Dolphin Publisher. And some of these names are fairly similar, and when we get out of here you might say 'Jeff, I need a refresher,' and that is fine, we can do that. Publisher is specifically set up for folks who want to author their own DAISY books, and they want human narrated speech as a part of it. So you could do this in a couple of different ways. You can read the book right into Dolphin Publisher yourself, or you can take a series of MP3 files, bring them into Dolphin Publisher, and then synchronize the text with the speech. Remember how I talked a while ago about being able to have text and speech both, having them synchronize in the player? So when you are listening to your audio, you also see the text on screen? If that is something you want to do and you want the human narrated speech to be a part of that, not synthesized speech, Dolphin Publisher is a product that you want to have.
Also, if you're working with foreign languages, Dolphin Publisher is going to be the program you want as far as creating DAISY goes. For foreign languages, you definitely want Publisher. There was a lot more capability there as well, and if this is a product you already have or have had some experience with and you are only producing synthesized DAISY talking books, that's fine. It has that capability as well. But if you are looking at a new product for the first time and you are only going to be doing synthesized speech, EasyConverter -- the product that I will show you in a little while -- could be the product that you could choose.
So again, if you want clarification on that and to talk more about that, we can do it off-line. But the biggest thing to remember from Dolphin is that we have several DAISY products, several DAISY authoring tools. We have the EasyReader and the Dolphin Player. So a lot to remember, but definitely some wonderful products if you want to learn more about DAISY, and you can find it at Dolphin.
One thing to let you know was that with our Dolphin Player, EasyReader, you get one copy with any one of the DAISY products that you order. So whether you use Producer or Publisher or EasyConverter, you will receive EasyReader with it. That is to test your DAISY and make sure the DAISY is set up the way you want it, that it looks good, that the speech sounds good, that you have everything set up before you deliver to your students or clients or whoever is going to read your DAISY material. Whether it is a textbook, marketing materials, materials from your organization, whatever that is.
Hopefully that makes sense, that you will get a copy of EasyReader as part of your installation of Producer, Converter, or Publisher.
Lots of folks and we deal with have EasyReader on student machines or machines you find in a computer lab or in a training lab, depending on where you are. So we have the ability for you to purchase a multiuser license of EasyReader. Most of these DAISY authoring tools, these production tools, at least in this country, are not used by the students themselves or clients of the agency, they are really a middleman product. They are used by the service provider and by the folks that are actually producing the materials in the accessible formats. We don't typically find they are actually used by the students themselves, although they could be.
So when we talk about EasyReader, the player to play the DAISY on, that is very often distributed in a much wider and on a lot more machines than you would find for the authoring tools themselves. So hopefully that makes sense. And we have some very reasonable price points set up for you to get EasyReader on your campus, in your lab, or wherever you need that used.
Let's talk about EasyConverter now a little bit. I will take you through the process of creating a DAISY book. And at the end I will let you hear what we have actually done.
I have a very simple, straightforward PDF file that we are going to do. It is a business test. We are going convert it to DAISY and then play it in EasyReader. What we are going to do is throughout this process of making our DAISY talking books, we are going to add some navigation to this test. Wouldn't it be nice if you were a student to be able to navigate by each question in your test rather than just having to listen to it completely. Because what if you get down to question 30 and you wanted back to question 2? If there was not any navigation built into it, you would have to rewind or fast-forward your track on your digital player until you got there, almost like rewinding or fast forwarding your cassette tape back in the day. But if we build in navigation or headings in our document, build in our navigational points, we can actually set it up so you can move by each question in the test.
And that is what we do. DAISY supports multiple levels of navigation. So if we wanted to, we could set this up where we can navigate by each question. Further to that, we can navigate by each choice under each question. We are not going to do that in this case, we are just going to set up a navigational point for each question, but we could. That is the beauty and the power of DAISY, that you can get as specific as you want to in navigation through your book or training material or whatever it is. So there is a lot of capability here.
So that is what we will do. We will bring the PDF through, and we have a couple of intermediate stages in the process as we are moving the PDF through the conversion process. One of those is OCR. I don't mean the Office of Civil Rights in this case. A lot of images we do with our electronic files, images of the file to begin with. In that case we need optical character recognition, OCR, to be able to extract the text from the image and turn it into something readable by a screen reader or by Dolphin Player. In that case, we use OCR in our PDF file to be able to extract that text and turn it into text that we can read.
Some of the popular OCR programs out there are OmniPage, ABBYY FineReader could as well, OpenBook, and maybe you have dealt with some of these. Within DAISY converter we have OCR built-in, and the version of OmniPage Pro 16 built into EasyConverter as well, so you don't have to worry about is my PDF an image, can we handle that? Yes, absolutely we can.
The second intermediate stage, and the one I will show you today, is Microsoft Word. Everything we bring into EasyConverter, whether it is DAISY or something else, stops at Microsoft Word for us to build in our navigation or for us to add alternative text to images, or to be able to edit the text. Maybe it is not in the right order, and we want to massage it a little bit. We all know how powerful an editor and word processor Microsoft Word is. So that is used in EasyConverter as well.
So to review, we will bring the PDF through, convert it to DAISY, and then look at it in EasyReader. And this is our business test. And I will show you how we can navigate by each question in our test.
So let me do this -- I'm going to open Dolphin EasyConverter version 5.05 on my computer. Even though you cannot see the screen, you will still be able to listen to me describe the process as we go through. And let me remind you again that if you are interested in this and want to take a look, we can do a webinar for you where you can actually see me go through the process.
So let's start from the beginning. Everything we do in EasyConverter is called a project. So we name our project file. We bring our file through the project. We have a resulting project title at the end. This is also set up in such a way that after all of your files are converted, you can find them in a very neatly organized directory on your Windows machine. So with other programs out there you might wonder what happened? I did the conversion and I converted to DAISY, but now how can I find my file? With EasyConverter that is very easy to do.
So the first step is to name the project. This is a business test and I'm doing it, so I will just say "Jeff B test." Then I will go to Next.
Now we choose our input document. What kind of document do we want to bring in? Is it an electronic or is it a hard copy paper material? Remember I mentioned we have OCR built-in, so we can scan as well. If we have a scanner and we need to scan in hard copy material, no problem, we can do that with EasyConverter.
We will open an electronic document now, and it is called business test questions, and it is the PDF. I've got it and I go to Next.
Now, because this is a PDF file it asks you if you want to import whole file or parts of the text. This is extremely important when we are working with textbooks and very large PDF files. If you get your textbook from publishers, very often they are in PDF format and they are large, large files. We never recommend that you bring hundreds and hundreds of pages through at one time for the simple fact that it can be very labor intensive on your computer, and also if you do encounter any errors, it can take a whole long time to try to find them. And also, the more you bring in at a time the longer it takes to convert. So for varying reasons, just a few which I just gave you, we recommend you bring in only 200 or 300 pages at the most at one time. So we give you the ability here -- if you want to split up your PDF, you can do that. But I will bring all the pages because this is only six pages long.
Now, do I want EasyConverter to try to detect the headings in my document -- yes or no? I will say yes. Also, do I want to look at this in Microsoft Word? As I mentioned to you a moment ago, everything we bring through an EasyConverter, Microsoft Word is our intermediate stage. So even if we don't look at it in Microsoft Word, it is first converted to a Word document before we convert to DAISY. And I'm going to say yes, I do want to look at this in Microsoft Word as I am going through. So here we go.
I am now at a drop-down box which is asking me to choose my alternative format. EasyConverter is our most popular device from Dolphin because it converts to print, to Braille, and to MP3 audio, or even to plain text. So sometimes you may have a need for something other than DAISY, and we have that ability here with EasyConverter. In this case we are going to convert to DAISY, it will be DAISY 3. I'm also asked do I want to create synthesized speech as part of my conversion, yes or no? For our purposes I will say no, and the reason is because I know the EasyReader -- remember, EasyReader is Dolphin's Dolphin Player -- has its own built-in synthesized speech. So I don't have to do it twice, I don't have to create it on this side because I know I will be able to use that synthesizer in EasyReader when I'm done. And then we click Next.
Now we are asked if we want to copy it somewhere else. Remember I mentioned that all of our files and our projects are neatly stored in a folder on our Windows computer? For your convenience we are asked if we want to copy it to another folder, or burn it on a CD or DVD, or save it to a USB device like a thumb drive or network drive or someplace else other than where it is stored by default. For our purposes I will say no, and that is it. I'm ready to convert.
So let me go to Finish. And what is happening now is this is actually being converted to Microsoft Word. We will take a look at this in Word in just a second, and that is where I will add the headings that I need for my PDF business test. So again, we are converted from PDF to Microsoft Word so far, and ultimately we will end up with a DAISY talking book from the PDF file.
I am now in Microsoft Word. And I'm looking at my PDF file. This is a standard test with multiple choice questions. There are about 38 questions here, and I'm going to put headings only around the first few. Remember, in this case what a heading means is a navigational point, a way to be able to in my Dolphin Player navigate by each one of these test questions. So I am using my arrow keys now and I am listening to this on my screen reader. I moving down to question one, and I'm going to put a heading level two around question one. That is my navigational point.
Number two would do the same thing and so on through about question seven. This is giving me the ability -- and I will be able to show you this just a moment, because you will be able to hear my speech reader -- and I will show you how I can move between each question.
Bear with me here just a second while I do the rest of these…
I am putting on number five… And I'm going to number six and seven, and I will be done.
So here we are. We now have navigational points around the first seven questions in this test. You'll get an idea on exactly what we are trying to do here in just a moment.
Now, if there was anything else I wanted to do in Word before I save and close this, this is where you do it. I could add alternative text on images -- so if there are pictures on here and I wanted to describe the pictures, or if they were relevant to the test, we would do that here, and that description of the text would come to here in our DAISY talking book. If I want to move any of the text around, I can do that here as well. If I'm ready to close and move on to the next stage, I can do that now, and what is going to happen next is this will be converted to DAISY. So I'm going to close Microsoft Word now and in a matter of seconds -- I'm at 72 percent now -- we are going to have ourselves a DAISY talking book.
And there it is, we have it. It took three minutes and four seconds to do it, by the way. That is the whole conversion process. So the time elapsed is pretty important, especially if you are trying to figure out in your disability service office or organization how to make your workflow more efficient, simplify the process of creating alternative formats. This shows you right here exactly how long this took. Also handy if you have to make the presentation yourself to you administrators or your bosses to convince them to purchase this product, you can show them how long it takes to process this and get it done.
So let's now go to view output, because what we what we have now done at this point is created a DAISY talking book. So in order to look at it, if I go to view output, EasyReader is going to open -- that is Dolphin's Dolphin Player -- and I will then be able to play it. And remember, if you are doing this with the program I just used, EasyConverter or EasyProducer or Dolphin Publisher, you will get a copy of EasyReader so you can test your DAISY and make sure it is correct just like I'm going to do right now.
So I go to view output and EasyReader will open. And what I now have the ability to do is with a keystroke start the speech playing and find out if my navigational points are correct. Let me let you hear this. This is RealSpeak Tom, and he is a popular guy in the synthesized speech world. He is from Nuance and he is all over the place. He is on the weather radio stations. So if you have a weather radio in your house and you hear synthesized speech, a forecast of current conditions or an advisory or a watch or warning, that is Tom. Let's test this out.
[Synthesized voice reading]
Now, over the webinar here -- talking communities -- you may not be able to understand that really clearly. But I can tell you on this side, this speech is pretty clear. It is a little clearer, we believe, than the older Eloquence speech for screen readers, although Eloquence has its place and probably will for a long time. In fact, on my screen reader I still use it, because eloquence is so responsive and very fast. But for something like this, what is more important is how clear the speech is, how humanlike it sounds, and we get lots and lots of compliments from folks who do this and hear about this speech.
Let me show you next the navigation that we have built-in. I'm going to move with my arrow keys to each question. I will start with number one and go up to number seven, because that is the navigation points I have built-in.
[Synthesized voice] Question one. In marketing research -- question two, three, four, five, six seven.
JEFF BAZER: Now, I did not let those questions read, but I will go back and do that. I just moved from question one to question seven very quickly using my arrow keys.
I didn't put in any additional navigation points after number seven, so it's skipped to question 31. So let's think about this -- if I'm at question 31 and I want to go back to number 2, if I did not have the navigation points and built-in headings I put in Word, I would have to rewind or search backwards on my track to go back to question 2. It might take me five minutes to get there, or longer. Watch how long it takes me to move back from question 2 to question 31.
That's question two.
Now remember, as we are doing this, this is all being highlighted on the screen as well, and we can change the size of the text, or the color or the color of the highlight, so we have got a lot of things going on here. We are able to listen to the text, of course, but we are also able to see it on screen if need be for a low vision user or somebody who is dyslexic or has another print disability.
This is the beauty of DAISY, and the quick and dirty version of how to create a DAISY talking book.
Now let's say that under question 32 I wanted to set a bookmark. No problem. With EasyReader I just press CTRL=B for 'bookmark,' and I'm presented with a dialog box that allows you to type in text for reference to the bookmark or to record audio, if I want to. If I want to remind myself something like 'make sure before the test you go back and review this material again,' I could record it just like an audio recorder would allow me to do. And I can put an unlimited amount of bookmarks in there.
Let me tell you where this is extremely or exceptionally important, and something that I can think of right away. If you are a member of the NFB or know anybody who is, or if you have access to BookShare as well, BookShare and the National Federation of the Blind have a partnership where on BookShare's website or on the NFB newsline website, you can download a series of newspapers and magazines in DAISY format. So let's say you were looking at USA Today or the Wall Street Journal or something else where you have several different news articles there. What if you look at this in the morning when you don't have a lot of time, you are getting ready to go to work? But you could use the headlines and take a look and see what you're interested in. You can set a bookmark for each headline that you want to go back and read at a later time. You can do that.
And tonight when we come home and have more time, we would be able to go back to a list of bookmarks in the Wall Street Journal and figure out only what we are interested in rather than having to go back to the whole book, and then read each article based on our bookmarks.
The same can apply to this test that we just did. Let's say we are not sure about question two, but we go finish the rest of the test, answer all the rest of the questions, but we know we will be coming back to question two. Well, we go to our list of bookmarks, punch that up, and we go back to the only bookmark we have which is question two, and we get there very quickly. It is just another way to navigate quickly through our DAISY talking books that we have.
And that is how we do it, guys. You can do this with EasyConverter like I just did, you can do it with Dolphin Publisher, you can do it with EasyProducer if you have it in a Word document.
Now, you might have some questions on that. Let's say you only have a budget for EasyProducer. In other words, for you to create your DAISY, you need it in Microsoft Word first, it has to be a Word document first. Well, in many of the OCR editing programs out there like ABBYY Find or OmniPage or others, you have the ability from those programs to convert your PDF into either HTML or Microsoft Word. So if you had to first get your PDF into Microsoft Word format, most of those programs will allow you to do that. Then you could use EasyProducer in order to take it from Microsoft Word and convert it to DAISY.
The difference with Converter, the one that I just used and our most popular program, is that it supports more file types like PDF, like [INAUDIBLE], like HTML or XML. And not only does it produce DAISY, it also produces MP3, large print, Braille, and plaintext as well. So it is a bit more versatile than our EasyProducer program. A bit more versatile than Dolphin Publisher as well, our high-end authoring tool.
But again, the different with Publisher is that this is the only product that Dolphin offers if you are doing human-narrated speech. In other words, if you are reading the material yourself, it is the only converter that allows you to import MP3s as part of your DAISY talking book.
I have thrown a lot of information at you. There is one final thing I want to do here right now. Sometimes you might run into folks who don't have a Dolphin Player at all. But you want to create DAISY for them. You know that they are familiar with the format, they love the navigability that is built-in, and you want to share DAISY with them and show them how incredible this format is. How easy it is to be able to navigate to where they need to get to quickly in a DAISY talking book. If the people you want to share this with do not have a Dolphin Player, they don't have a hardware or software player on the computer, we have one more option from Dolphin that would allow you to share your DAISY content with them. It is called EasyReader Express. And basically it is a way for us to attach a very minimal, as far as features go, a minimal featured player to the DAISY project that you have created. You can then put that on your website or send it in an e-mail or save it on some kind of media, like an SD card or onto CD or something like that.
Then when your student or your client or whatever it is opens it on their computer, it automatically opens in this player. So just to reaffirm, they don't need a Dolphin Player on the computer at all; you deliver the Dolphin Player to them with the content that you created.
The one limitation is that the player only works for the content that you created. In other words, it is specific to the book that you have created. You're not giving them a player that they can play all DAISY on, but only the DAISY that you've created.
We have a video now, and you will hear the guy named Paul, he's in the UK and you will hear his British accent, and you will see a video describing this process of how EasyReader works. So Norm, if you control this, let's check it out.
[Audio from the video] Hello, and welcome to Dolphin video tutorials. In this video we will look at EasyReader Express. EasyReader Express is an innovative web-based subscription service. EasyReader Express enables experienced DAISY talking book providers to add an compressed version of EasyReader to the DAISY talking books. With EasyReader Express, readers can instantly open the DAISY talking book in the fully accessible reader. By adding EasyReader Express, DAISY talking book producers can ensure all of their readers can access DAISY talking books.
Adding EasyReader Express is ideal for publishers of DAISY talking books, professional transcription services, and DAISY talking book libraries.
This tutorial focuses on adding Dolphin EasyReader Express via Dolphin EasyConverter.
I can set the project as I normally would -- choosing a name, I'm going to call it "Alice" because I'm using a PDF of Alice in Wonderland. And select my PDF, that is already selected. I do not want to open it up in the OCR editor, and I do not want to look at it in Microsoft Word. I have used the PDF plenty of times and I know that I do not have to do any editing on it.
Here we are choosing an alternative format stage, and as you can see there is a tick box here saying Yes Add EasyReader Express to the PDF. All I have to do to at EasyReader is simply tick this box.
Now all I have to do is add a name and password. These are the details you will be given if you sign up to a subscription of Dolphin EasyReader Express.
Once I have added my details, I simply click on Express. Now I can continue with the conversion in the usual way.
So that is my conversion completed. Now under resulting alternative formats, I can see my DAISY talking book, so I can select it, go to location, and here you can see an extra couple of files that you normally would not see when you have created the DAISY talking book. One of these files is called DRE or Dolphin EasyReader Express. All I have to do is run this file. And here we are, my DAISY talking book has opened up in Dolphin EasyReader Express. And it is really as simple as that; just ticking a box and entering in your details.
PROF. COOMBS: Okay, Jeff, that is our video. Marisol, any questions in the text chat window?
MARISOL MIRANDA: Yes, we have two. From Christy, how good is the OCR comparison to software like ABBYY Find?
PROF. COOMBS: Marisol, your voice was very weak. I can hear you now, go ahead.
MARISOL MIRANDA: Okay, the first question is from Christy -- how good is the OCR comparison to software like ABBYY Find reader?
JEFF BAZER: For some reason my control key was not working, I apologize. I pressed the control key and nothing happened, but when I go to lock it works.
That is a very good question, and the answer is the OCR is very comparable. In fact, we have OmniPage built in, and people go back and forth between Omni and ABBYY all the time on which one they like better, which one has better features and things like that. So EasyConverter has basically the exact same type of OCR capability that you were talking about.
MARISOL MIRANDA: One more question from Mike -- does the reading number 1, 2, 3 determine the navigation level 1, 2, 3 in documents?
JEFF BAZER: Yes, absolutely. It correlates exactly like that. The levels -- the corresponding levels of the headings are the levels of navigation within the DAISY talking book. So if I go back to, for example the newspaper example I mentioned earlier, your heading level ones would be the sections of the newspaper, maybe news, sports, weather, local news, whatever it is -- and the next corresponding level would be the articles themselves within each section of the newspaper. That's right.
MARISOL MIRANDA: Those are the only two questions.
JEFF BAZER: Very good, thank you guys. Well, I think that what we have done here today in a pretty short time -- an hour goes by quickly when we do this kind of thing -- is we have at least given you some exposure to producing DAISY talking books with the Dolphin suite of DAISY authoring tools that we have. What I would encourage you to do as a take-away from this webinar is to explore a little further on our website the programs so you can differentiate what they all do and the offerings from each. We do have a series of videos for each program, so if you want to go explore our whole library of videos, you can do that from our website. They are all available on YouTube as well. So if there is a specific program you want to learn more about, you can go to YouTube and type it in and the Dolphin videos will come up there as well.
The other thing I would encourage you to do if you want to learn more about DAISY itself is to go to the DAISY Consortium's website. There is a vast amount of information that regarding DAISY. There is even a newsletter called the DAISY Planet, it is a monthly newsletter, I believe, that comes out and it talks about all kinds of things, about what is going on around the world related to DAISY. There is also more information on setting up DAISY talking books as far as building a navigational structure and building the files set in, doing it the proper way. And more information than you probably ever care to know about how DAISY works and all of the ins and outs. So it is a wonderful reference site for you, www.DAISY.org. Again, www.DAISY.org would be a great site to bookmark if you want to learn more about it.
And I hope you bookmark our site too, www.yourDolphin.com.
And also, I know that last week we had my contact information up on the screen as part of the title page, and Norm, can you let me know or anybody else if that is there again? I hope that all of you have reference to my phone number and e-mail address. If not, I will audibly give you that so you can write it down and you have that information. Do we have that?
PROF. COOMBS: I don't think it's there, but I will be sending an e-mail to everybody on the mailing list for the series by tomorrow, and that will take you to our resource page with the archives on it, several other Dolphin videos, and Jeff's contact information will all be there. So expect that by tomorrow.
And I do want to give a plug for thing I'm doing on the first at this hour. It is a bit different, but it still relates to digital books. A lot of commercial companies have been putting out a lot of digital books, and you wind up having to buy their Kindle or their Nook to read it, and a lot of them are proprietary e-book formats, and they don't even talk to each other. And they have been inaccessible. They're starting to make more of these accessible, particularly software versions of their players. So I'm going to be talking about that on May 1, particularly focusing on Kindle for the PC, Leo, and on Adobe Digital Editions preview. So we will be looking at different players for commercial products. They are getting accessible, they have not done as good a job of building in personal control and the navigation that we have here on DAISY. Hopefully that will come sometime. So anyhow, I will be talking about that, good and bad points, on May 1.
Thank you very much, Jeff, and all of your information will be in the e-mail I send out and on the archive. Thank you everyone, and I will look forward to seeing you again.
JEFF BAZER: I want to thank you guys for taking time to be a part of the webinar today. I hope that the information we have given you, I hope you've found that appropriate and what you expected to get out of the webinar. And I also hope that if you need more information or if there is anything else I can help you with, you will contact me at your convenience. We want to be able to help, we agreed to do that, and hopefully we will have you using our Dolphin products if you don't already do so.
Again, one thing I would reiterate is that Norm is doing some great stuff. And I think the webinar on May 1 is especially important as well. Because this arena of digital talking books, whether it is DAISY or EPUB or otherwise, is changing so fast. We are now at the point where a lot of times you don't go buy your textbook at the bookstore anymore, you get it on some kind of electronic device to be able to play it on. So I think the more we know about digital talking books, whatever kind they are, and what is coming down the pike -- probably we will be better armed to know what we are doing and to help our students or clients or agencies in days to come.
So again, thank you all for being here, and I hope to talk with you all again soon.