Tech Talk:
The Digital Talking Book
The Daisy Consortium
The Digital Talking
Book: The DAISY Book
A new and
comfortable way of reading talking books
There are many reasons for reading. One is to get access to information, to obtain knowledge about things we need to know. Another reason is to experience joy and excitement. As a teacher you know that your students’ reading improves their language and increases their vocabulary. A book might absorb you completely, and make you dread the moment when it is finished. Of course everyone should be able to read books, lots of books!
For many young people with visual impairment, the talking book is a necessary tool in their studies.
The typical student that I am thinking of is a teenager, whose vision has deteriorated, and reading print has become too tiring and too time-consuming. He or she started to learn Braille a few years ago, and has not yet reached an acceptable reading rate, sufficient for studying. In this situation I would always advice him or her to start reading talking books.
In my work as a teacher at the Institute for Special Needs Education I have often noticed that both the students and their teachers have been a bit reluctant to using talking books as study material, the main reason being the complex navigating among the cassettes. The students’ earlier experiences of talking books consist mainly of listening to fiction, which means placing the first cassette in the tape recorder and changing cassettes after a while; no searching for specific pages or paragraphs. It seems to be a simple enough activity. But you need to keep your mind on what you hear. Everyone who has listened to a recorded book – or tried to listen to it – knows how hard it can be to keep concentrated on the text, when you are free to do other things while listening. When you have reached the level where you really enjoy listening to the book, then you have come a long way, and you have acquired what is absolutely necessary for studying non-fiction by using talking books.
You must be extremely motivated to listen to a non-fiction text without having prepared yourself in one way or another. An impending examination can surely be motivation enough. But otherwise you need some kind of strategy. Preparing a pupil for reading a recorded non-fiction text might consist of giving him some hints of what the text is about, some words to collect information about or some questions to find the answers to. On top of that there is the navigating among the cassettes – listening to the list of contents, choosing cassette, start the fast forward winding to the specific paragraph, while listening to different signals. This takes time.
Sometimes the teacher prepares this before the lesson starts, so the student can sit down and just push the play button. But in this way the student does not have the freedom to read what he needs to read, when he wants to read it. And as a good teacher I want to supply my student with an efficient study technique and make him independent in his studies.
New digital talking book
In the DAISY-format, the book is being recorded on CD-ROM discs. DAISY means Digital Audio Information System. There are two ways of listening to a DAISY-book, either in a special CD-player (e g the one called Plextalk or the smaller one, Victor) or in a special computer program (e g Playback 2000 or LpPlayer).
Advantages of the DAISY-book
The DAISY
format enables you to:
The Swedish Library for Talking books and Braille has at present about 2500 titles in the DAISY format. The institute for special needs education, the department for production of learning material, has up to now produced about 30 textbooks as DAISY-books and new titles are made on demands from teachers working with visually impaired students and students with a reading disability. The books already recorded on cassettes are continuously being transformed into the DAISY format.
My first contact with the DAISY-book took place about two years ago. All my experiences regarding the new digital talking book have so far been good ones. The students I have met appreciate the efficient way of navigating in the book. Imagine getting a complete encyclopedia on three or four CD-ROM discs! Students with a reading disability realize that from now on the talking book will be very valuable in their studies, not just something you turn to when there is no other alternative left.
Correspondence:
Catharina
Johansson
catharina.johansson@sit.se
Column editor:
Harry
Svensson
Swedish
Institute for Special Needs Education
Box 1313
SE- 171 25 Solna
Sweden
Fax: +46 8 4700707
harry.svensson@sit.se
There is an international group called the Daisy Consortium. Its mission is to develop the international standard and implementation strategies for the production, exchange and use of Digital Talking-Books in both developed and developing countries
See www.daisy.com for more information.