By Larry Skutchan
As the Internet explodes and the pace of our lives becomes faster, most
of us find we have increasing amounts of material to read. The advent of
the PC has been a tremendous access breakthrough for blind students and
professionals, but reading has traditionally meant being chained to the
computer. Road Runner changes all that.
Road Runner is a small device (not much larger than a single cassette tape)
that is used to read books away from your computer. It uses a high quality,
built-in RC Systems DoubleTalk® speech synthesizer to read, and it holds
about 2000 pages of text. Road Runner is powered with two AA batteries,
which last for about 50 hours of continuous reading.
Obtaining Reading Material
Obtaining books in electronic format is accomplished in one of the following
ways:
• From
the supplied CD
• By
finding them on the Internet
• By
scanning them in with an optical character recognition (OCR) program
The Supplied CD
The CD that comes with Road Runner contains over 1700 books including classic
literature, history, and reference material.
Finding books on the Internet
When one thinks of references to electronic text available on the Internet,
the Gutenberg Project comes first to mind. The Gutenberg Project is a library
of several thousand books in the public domain. They are freely available
from several places on the Internet. www.gutenberg.net
is a good place to get books and a list of other sites where the Gutenberg
Project material is archived. A group of interested individuals volunteers
to scan or type these books into plain ASCII files and make them available
for free to anyone who wants to read them.
While the Gutenberg Project is admirable and certainly provides some interesting
reading material, chances are you already have subject matter that your
study or profession requires. Most likely, you'll have to either obtain
this material from other places on the Internet or by scanning it in with
an OCR program.
As the growth of the Internet explodes, so does the quality and quantity
of material in electronic format. There are hundreds of magazines, newsletters,
newspapers, and books available from various places on the Internet. We
already mentioned the Gutenberg Project. What follows is a list of some
interesting places to obtain electronic reading material, but the most important
thing to keep in mind when looking for text on the Internet is to search
often. Don't be surprised to find new listings every time you do. Use key
words like etext, electronic text, ebooks, online books, and online newsletters.
Any of the major search engines will yield results with these key words.
If you get too many hits or if you want to narrow the scope of your search,
try adding key words for the subject material you're looking for. Ask Jeeves®at www.aj.com is a good search engine that
submits your search request to several of the other popular search engines.
You may also want to try Alta Vista® at www.altavista.com,
Lycos® at www.lycos.com, and Yahoo® at www.yahoo.com for good search engines
that will all find more material than you might think. For an extremely
speech friendly interface that lets you select the search engine you want
to use, try www.seti-search.com.
One relatively new phenomena is the advent of electronic publishers. Electronic
publishers are alternatives to traditional paper publishing, and they represent
a breakthrough for the amount of material available to blind and visually
impaired people.
Electronic publishers market themselves to both readers and authors. The
reader gets a book for less than he can purchase it on paper because it
is easier to distribute, and the authors get their work published because
there are no high initial costs to get the book printed and distributed.
It is truly a win-win situation. The only slight drawback is that you won't
find Daniel Steel or Robert Ludlum at the electronic publishers. You are
more likely to find new authors who cannot get published by the traditional
publishers or who find that electronic distribution works better for them.
Authors also receive a much higher royalty from electronic books because
there are no high printing and distribution costs.
It is nice to be able to browse the titles without sighted assistance,
and when you purchase the book, you can begin reading it immediately instead
of waiting for days while you scan the book into your OCR program.
www.booklocker.com is an example
of such an electronic publishing house. They have hundreds of books to choose
from in a number of categories. Their prices range from just over $5 to
around $20 per title. Their ordering system works well with speech, and
you will get your book emailed to you within hours of your purchase. www.hardshell.com
is another electronic publishing house that sells books online. www.netbooks.com
sells books in its online book store. This site also offers free books.
In addition to electronic publishing houses that sell books to you, there
are lots of places on the Internet to obtain material for free. Cathy's
News Stand at www.cathyanne.com is
a great source for electronic text of all kinds. Cathy's Web page contains
links to magazines, reference works, newspapers, and just about anything
else you can think of. Cathy makes it her business to keep up-to-date on
electronic sources of reading material, and she shares that work through
her Web page.
Electric Books at www.electricbook.com
is another good place to start when looking for material, especially about
a specific subject. This site categorizes its magazine listings by subject
and its newspapers by state, so it is fairly easy to narrow down the amount
of material you have to plow through.
Ask Magpie Magazines at www.askmagpie.com contains links to over 7000 online magazines and journals. As they say, "The bigger the Web gets, the harder it gets to find what you want."
Ask Magpie Magazines lets you search by category or travel through common
categories to find what you want. Once you select a category, Ask Magpie
presents a sub-category, so it is fairly painless to narrow your focus through
its database. Once you do find the specific magazine you’re looking
for (or find a new one you didn't know about,) you can go directly to that
magazine's site with the provided links.
When looking for a specific magazine online, try just using that magazine’s
address as the URL you want to open with your browser's "Open" command. www.readersdigest.com,
www.newsweek.com, and www.time.com
are all valid addresses that will take you right to the site you imagine
they would. The APH Technology Update is available at www.aph.org/techup.
The Library of Congress maintains an excellent page of etext sources at
www.loc.gov/global/etext/etext.html.
It contains links to magazines, newsletters, and government publications
and documents.
In addition to all the generally available electronic text you may find
on the Internet, don't forget to check APH's Louis database of accessible
materials for electronic textbooks from a variety of alternate media suppliers. The Louis database of accessible materials is accessible through APH's main
Web page at www.aph.org. In addition to
Braille, large print, and recorded listings, Louis contains an electronic
text media type, and you can use that as a criterion for searching the database.
Reprinted with permission from the American Printing House for the
Blind, Inc., Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2000
