[bksvol-discuss] Re: **text Quality**
- From: "Sarah Van Oosterwijck" <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:29:36 -0500
Please Excuse me for the length of this message. It was an accident.
there is no great solution for making books with dialect pleasant to read
with speech, but you might try creating a pronunciation dictionary
specifically for these books. Of course that might mask OCR errors if you
are not careful.
Most screen readers allow you to make pronunciation fixes for single words,
multiple words, and strange combinations of characters which would include
punctuation. That means you can change the pronunciation of t apostrophe to
tuh or whatever you like. You may not like the results any better, but you
can experiment. I have just gotten somewhat used to dialect as rendered by
synthesizers. :-)
The punctuation I have filled my pronunciation dictionary with is emoticons,
like the smily above. Multiple words can be useful in your pronunciation
dictionary when a phrase is pronounced differently than the separate words
that comprise it.
Which reminds me of another tip that is not really relevant. I had to make
sure that comprise was the right word, so I used google to look it up. You
can do this easily by typing define colon and then the word you would like
to look up in the google search edit. I can make this on toppic for
bookshare by saying that I often have to check things I find in books that I
think have a chance of being either a scanno or a real word that i am just
not familiar with. If I am using Kurzweil I just use it's dictionary, but
if I'm in Word, google is the most efficient site for me to use to look up a
word. Practically no clutter.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck
curious entity at earthlink dot net
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louise" <lougou@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 12:01 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: **text Quality**
> speaking of text quality, how do you handle a book in which the word you
> appears as a y and an apostrophe, or the word you're appears as y'r or
the
> word to appears as the letter t and an apostrophe. This may be fine with
a
> Braille display, but it's very annoying with speech. As an example:
>
> Are y' going t' the store today?
>
> I realize this is a form of dialect and assume it should be left as is, is
> this correct? If it was me, I would put the letter a after the y' and
the
> t', which would make it easier to listen to, but that would change the
book,
> which I assume is a no-no. Louise
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <talmage@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 10:02 AM
> Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: **text Quality**
>
>
> > At 10:49 PM 4/28/2004, you wrote:
> >
> > > >This without doubt is my biggest issue with bookshare. The "fair
> rating."
> > > >In my experience, anything marked fair is usually almost unreadable.
> >
> > I agree with the overall sentiment of what you are saying, but there are
> > always exceptions to any rule.
> > Some books are still rated fair as a result of the bug that existed in
the
> > Bookshare rating system a while back;
> > Some books are rated fair because of numerous foreign language words,
and
> a
> > poor job by the person who edited the submission in not catching this
and
> > boosting the rating;
> > Some are rated fair because the headers and footers didn't scan well and
> > weren't stripped out, but the text may deserve a good rating;
> > Some books may have instances of hand written letters inserted which may
> > not seriously impact the overall readability of the book;
> > Some books may be accurate reflections of the written text, but by
todays
> > standards of spelling and grammar may get a fair rating;
> > and, some books may be so old and rare that you can't find them
elsewhere,
> > but you can only get a fair rating out of them.
> >
> > Perhaps Bookshare should also have a poor rating for the really bad
scans,
> > but where the books may still have some redeeming qualities.
> >
> > > >To the people who say, "having the book is better then no book at
all,"
> I
> > > >say, you are outright wrong!!"
> > >
> > >I have to say, that 1 word "wrong", was probably the only reason I
> decided
> > >to respond to this message.
> > As the saying goes, "different strokes for different folks." I may like
> > single malt scotch, while you may not, but this doesn't make you
> > wrong. It's called a different opinion.
> > While I may not read books with a fair rating often, there have been
> > occasions where I have because they may have been the only copy I could
> > find available.
> > Personally, I hate braille, and wouldn't even consider reading anything
> > longer than a label in that form; likewise, I no longer listen to tape
> > books as I can kill a cassette player probably quicker then anyone you
> have
> > ever met.
> > It also used to drive me crazy trying to coax a tape along that wasn't
> > cooperating, or getting to tape 4, of a 6 tape set only to find it was
> useless.
> >
> > Ultimately, I would like to see Bookshare start a program aimed at
> > improving the quality of the collection. Maybe have a separate download
> > section for the volunteers where the books rated fair could be rescanned
> to
> > improve the quality.
> >
> > In closing, I have to add, that after using a KRM model 400 for years,
> even
> > some of the books rated fair on Bookshare are an improvement.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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