Libraries serving persons with print disabilities and DAISY standards in the US

George Kerscher
Secretary General, DAISY Consortium and Senior Officer, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D)

Ohayoo gozaimasu. My name is George Kerscher, Secretary General with the DAISY Consortium. I also work for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. I’ll be talking about the library services for people with disabilities in the United States.

We’ll see if we get slides in a minute or two. There are three libraries in the United States. One is the Library of Congress. These are libraries serving people who are blind and physically handicapped. The other library is Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic and the other library is Bookshare.org.

I’ll start with the Library of Congress for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. “NLS” is how it’s referred to. This is federally funded. It’s a part of the Library of Congress. It provides free services to everybody who is blind or can prove that they have a disability that’s based on a physical disorder. It requires a doctor’s signature to become signed up and they serve approximately 500,000 people in the United States. They provide a free player to every person. Right now everybody still has the old cassette players. Starting next month they will be distributing DAISY players, 20,000 a month. They’re being manufactured by Plextor from Japan. The shipments are starting, so we’re very happy to see that development moving forward.

The Library of Congress uses professional readers, actors, to produce the books. They are paid and the books are very good. They’re high quality with great voices being used. They produce about 2,000 titles a year. Currently they have 13,000 titles in their collection. Primarily the people being served are those that are older adults. Young people who are blind are very small in number. They can use the service but we find that most people as they age develop eye problems and go blind and will use this service. Many elderly people (50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years old) are using the service. It really is a wonderful, wonderful service. The books are DAISY. They have navigation by heading. Normally page numbers are not put in. There are not student materials. It’s just leisure reading. There are trade books. There are magazines that are produced, as well.

I’ve covered all of the information up to there. Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic is privately funded. It’s a charity. It’s also non-profit. It receives some federal funding but most of the funding is from charitable donations. The focus is on educational materials and it has been around for more than 60 years. 5 years ago they started to produce DAISY content on CD-ROM and now have approximately 43,000 titles. They produce 7,000 titles a year that they distribute to approximately 100,000 students.
We register the people. They have to sign up for our services. We use the same law that allows us to distribute as Library of Congress and Bookshare. There’s a copyright exception that allows us to distribute the content. The books at this point have been audio only with the full DAISY navigation to chapter, section, subsection and to pages. Of course, students need to move very quickly, so having the DAISY functionality has been really, really good and very well-received.

Textbooks are highly graphical. A great deal of the information in the book is graphical content, not just text. Using the volunteers, they provide descriptions of the graphics. We make sure that the volunteers are qualified to read the subject matter by giving them tests. If they have a degree in a certain area, then they will record books in that subject matter. If it’s physics books, we have people who are science teachers reading those books. For mathematics, we will have people that are highly skilled with mathematics and so on. You have to have subject expertise in order to qualify as a reader for RFB&D. There are about 7,000 titles a year. I’ll state right now that about 300,000 new books are published in the United States every year. The 2,000 new books from the Library of Congress and the 7,000 from Recording for the Blind are still far short of all the titles that are needed. RFB&D does a good job of making the books available in kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s students up until about the age of 18. But at the college level, even though 60% of the books we produce are for college, we find that we fall far short of what is needed. In K-12 you have a certain number of books but then when you reach higher education the number and quantity just skyrockets. It becomes very broad, so it’s harder in higher education to meet the needs. We heard from Jim and Mika that they will produce a couple of hundred of titles a year. That is because RFB&D or Bookshare does not yet have the book.

Moving on, Bookshare.org is the newest organization serving people with disabilities. It’s really not that old. I think it’s maybe 7 or 8 years old now. I’m not exactly sure, but it’s very new. It was started by Jim Fruchterman, who was the founder of a company called Arkenstone which made scanning equipment. Jim sold that company to Freedom Scientific and with the proceeds started a number of service organizations and one is Bookshare.org. Because he had all of these people he had sold scanners to, the blind people were saying, “I scanned 500 books all by myself. Can I give them to other people?” Well, legally you can’t scan a book and give it to somebody else. Bookshare started the service by getting in touch with all of those blind people that Jim Fruchterman knew. They gave him these books and he started distributing them through Bookshare.org. It really started out as a grassroots service.
Some books scan very well. Novels scan really quite well. Textbooks, however, with highly graphical content or scientific material traditionally do not scan well. Most of the books that Jim had in Bookshare.org were leisure reading or books that were easily scanned. The textbooks were extremely difficult.

Bookshare uses text only. There is no recorded audio. Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic is audio plus DAISY navigation. Bookshare is DAISY navigation plus text with no human audio. It relies on the assistive technology that people with disabilities have to read the books. It’s also a download. From the beginning, there was never any CD-ROM distribution. Of course, the text-only books are very small compared to an audio book and download very quickly and easily. They work through all different subject areas. It’s not limited to just education but they do leisure reading, as well. I talked yesterday a bit about this idea of quantity versus quality. Bookshare knew that by taking books from blind people who had scanned materials that the quality would be hard to figure out. This is one of the things that Bookshare has been trying to do more and more, to determine which books are really good and which books are marginal. They’ve started more volunteer work and paid work to review the materials and try to give it a quality rating. In addition, both Bookshare and RFB&D have been closely working with the legislatures to try to get laws passed that will make it easier for us to get materials directly from the publishers.

In the United States, the Library of Congress is serving blind and physically handicapped (mostly elderly). RFB&D and Bookshare are focused on education more than anything else. Both RFB&D and Bookshare use the same criteria for qualifying students. It’s a little easier than the Library of Congress. Both of our organizations will allow a qualified person to sign the document that says they’ve got a disability that prevents them from reading standard print. The Library of Congress requires a physician to do this. One of the problems in schools is that for a student with dyslexia or a learning disability if you’re going to have a doctor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist say that it is based on a physical disability, those kinds of physical examinations are very expensive. It’s difficult for the schools to pay for that kind of thing, so RFB&D and Bookshare allow people that are not physicians to attest to the disability of the person. There has been some controversy there.

Bookshare is now distributing books that were deposited by publishers in the NIMAS format (that’s the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard). Laws have been passed that require publishers in kindergarten through 12th grade to deposit textbooks in the DAISY XML format. Then these books that are just the XML (it’s not the navigation center or audio recordings or anything; it’s just the materials from the text) Bookshare has been taking these and creating the DAISY version. There is no human audio. I think they have about 170 books now that they’ve converted from the 13,000 that are in the repository. Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic is going to add audio to these either through TTS or through human narration. RFB&D has made the decision that for books for students up to the age of about 10 years old they will not do text to speech. They’re just going to use human audio. They feel that it is too difficult for a student to process, to understand, synthetic speech so they’re going to record all of those books up to 3rd grade.

RFB&D and NLS are very old organizations. They’re well-established. Bookshare is very new. Bookshare is taking a more progressive look at some of these things. The Library of Congress encrypts and protects the book. If you get an NLS book unless you’re using a qualified player, it won’t work. Very few players so far have been certified to be used. They will be distributing their own players free of charge starting next month. I mentioned that. And they do allow a couple of other players, such as the Stream from Humanware. I believe the Pocket from Plextor will be qualified in a couple of weeks. I think there are one or two other players that have been used. RFB&D also used encryption, DRM (digital rights management). There’s a specification that’s called “protected digital talking book” that both of these organizations are using. On Bookshare, however, they’re a little more progressive and a little more modern in thinking. They are not using encryption. They believe that that encryption actually limits the legitimate use of the materials. Publishers are a little less happy with Bookshare. They’re not quite as comfortable. They’ve not stopped Bookshare from doing anything but I hear from publishers that they’re a little worried that these books might get into the hands of people without disabilities. What Bookshare does is they watermark it, which means that it identifies it as a book that’s only for people with disabilities and it’s from Bookshare.org. They also fingerprint it, which means that the person’s name and identification are in the book that they’ve downloaded. If they would redistribute that book, people could see that it’s from this particular person.

The future is, we believe, with the cooperation of publishers. Right now there’s not a good relationship between the libraries (both RFB&D and Bookshare) and the publishers. This has been created because of these laws that have been passed. We’d like to see more cooperation with publishers. Bookshare in particular is reaching out to publishers and trying to do more cooperative things. We’ve heard that Bookshare is now beginning to get books from publishers not only through the NIMAS but through private agreements to get books from publishers and distribute them through Bookshare.org. Bookshare is also very much interested in international distribution and has announced some distribution arrangements in other countries. Some of the titles in the Bookshare collection are in the public domain and can be downloaded by anybody throughout the world right now.