easy access to existing open source audio books
Librivox and Project Gutenberg both have a large number of readings of copyright free books. However the search and results pages for both of these are complex and contain a lot of extraneous information that is confusing for the inexperienced user.
aims
to produce *very* simple interface to search and return audio book matches that will work comfortably in screen readers including Guide.
current release
website: made-accessible.com/audiobooks
source: github.com/made-accessible/made-accessible.com
target audience
older less technical people who use speech inhancement or total speech interfaces.
technical approach
we have used advanced XML search available at archive.org, loading results to prioritise Librivox recordings which puts audio books above other audio recordings.
future development and enhancements
- ajax / aria to add more search results (currently restricted to 5)
- pictures of covers from librivox or archive.org
- crowd ratings of recordings
- auto generation of audio files from text files
Comments (8)
Libertus said
at 5:53 pm on Sep 20, 2008
I've just added a "more results" link in a way that I hoped would encourage screen readers to begin reading at the first new result. I tested in Orca but it just read the whole page again. Looks like I need to use accessible AJAX. Help! :D
Gilles Ruppert said
at 10:45 pm on Sep 20, 2008
I hope focus() solves your problem. Let me know how it goes. Artur told me that internal links definitely don't work for Voiceover (OSX screenreader) which makes my skip links useless for those people :-( good luck!
Hugh said
at 11:02 pm on Sep 22, 2008
Hi Guys, Hugh here from LibriVox ... we'd probably be really happy to integrate something like this as our main search (something like this has been on the to-do list for a long time) ... is it open source etc? are you interested in discussing further?
cheers,
Hugh.
Hugh said
at 11:12 pm on Sep 22, 2008
oh, and we do have some developers who would likely be interested in contributing too...
Christian Heilmann said
at 11:39 pm on Sep 22, 2008
The idea of Scripting Enabled is that everything should be open source that is released here. This is pretty sweet, but I'd love to have a way back to search for a different book. also, instead of the links just being offered we can use Soundmanager2 (http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/demo/page-player/) to offer an in-page player.
I was also thinking of offering a easy reader for the Gutenberg text books, all the legal mumbo jumbo is annoying. Maybe a self-scrolling reader using YUI?
Hugh said
at 12:02 am on Sep 23, 2008
superb...
Lucy Buykx said
at 3:44 pm on Sep 23, 2008
Hugh, great to hear that Librivox are interested. Of course all the code will go open source, just a matter of getting of tidying a couple of things (for sake of pride if nothing else!) and getting it to an open repository.
I like the sound of an in page player, however one of the key goals of this (our version at least) is to allow Guide users to easily download mp3s for mobile use. Most texts are lengthy, so locking someone to computer to listen to it is restrictive. I will try out that player on Guide later this week and see how it goes. Sorry its a bit slow this week - we're moving house and going on holiday this week so lots of packing and organising going on!
Hugh said
at 4:20 pm on Sep 23, 2008
hi lucyb ... excellent... we may want to adapt the code for our specific needs ... (take out the gutenberg searches, not have ratings -as per our policies- and possibly other things).
but we'll also encourage whoever installs the search elsewhere....
anyway thanks for this - as mentioned it's been on the to-do list for a long time, nice to see some external hackers working on it!
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