Book Reading Options for Inaccessible or Protected Daisy books.(self.Blind)
submitted by santaslittlehelper20
I'm the caretaker of a disabled family member who has lost their sight and has limited hand mobility. We are looking for suggestions about accessible books. BARD and Bookshare are great but there are many books missing in their catalogs. In our case, we have written to authors and publishers asking if they would consider publishing the books electronically. When we receive a response at all, it can be anything from helpful to a rude diatribe on disabilities and lectures about the "evils" of electronic books.
I recently found a book on open library that is not available on BARD or bookshare. I connected the bard account but it appears the protected DAISY format they produce will only work on Victor Reader Stream Players. We had considered purchasing the Victor Reader but found their cost prohibitive and the reviews about the ease of use and reliability lacking. I found a few of the readers on eBay but don't know if any would be a good idea.
We currently have the BARD player, an old MacBook and an older iPad Mini with Voice Dream, a Kindle Fire, Alexa devices, the dongle for the Paperwhite and a google home mini. None will play the files from open library.
**My Questions:**
Does anyone have suggestions for accessing openlibrary's protected Daisy format without a Victor Stream Reader using any of the devices we already have?
If not, is there an older Victor Reader used that will be reliable and worth the trouble?
Has anyone tried purchasng an old copy of a book to an OCR service to have it returned in an accessible format and destroyed? What about scanning a one of a kind (antique or out of print) without damaging it and returning. If so, how well did it work and was it worth the cost?
Are there other options for older books that are not in open library, bard or bookshare?
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Any insights would be very helpful. Thank you.
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Coloratura19873 points4y ago
Amazon Kindle and Scribd are both very accessible with screen readers. I'm not sure if you're looking for a free service, but both have a vast library of books.
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Scribd even have a limited collection of audio books, and unlike Audible, there is no limit on how many you can listen to per month. IN fact, you just pay one monthly subscription fee and gain access to their library of audio books, E-texts, various documents, magazines, other publications, and even sheet music.
I've never heard of protected daisy, but many books from mainstream sources can be made more accessible with the "Codex" or "Epubor" converters and a program like "QRead"
TheBlindBookLover1 points4y ago
Hi. I think that your issue with the protected DAISY file is that it is a zipped file It is simple to unzip files on your computer. You will need to go on Google and type in how to unzip files on (your computer type and software version). On windows, it only takes a few steps. I would guess that it is the same on a Mac.
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