Abstract

Edmar Schut
Dedicon. the Netherlands

At present, DAISY audio and text books are mainly used by people with a visual impairment or a reading disorder. Combining and synchronizing audio and text into a hybrid form results in a new type of multimedia object. This so-called hybrid book can serve a variety of other target groups as well. For instance, hybrid books are perfectly feasible for young people in an educational setting, especially when human voice recording is used instead of synthetic speech, and the print book’s original layout is preserved.

Dedicon produces hybrid books for several main publishers in the educational market. Audio and text is synchronized at the sentence level, or in some books even at the word level.

Hybrid books are used in regular education to support children that require additional help with learning to read or improving their reading skills.

Dedicon has developed a simple reading program for this type of hybrid books. The program can be used locally on one’s own computer or over the Internet or intranet by means of a browser.

In his presentation Edmar Schut will explain how Dedicon produces hybrid books and demonstrate their use in practice.