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easy audio books

Page history last edited by Libertus 16 years, 2 months ago

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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