ALA 2009 Presentation to ASCLA -- Large Print for All: Bigger is Better

I will be presenting as part of a panel on Sunday morning. The gist of my presentation is that
Libraries have an opportunity to increase their patron base by better serving visually impaired patrons. This will allow them to retain current patrons as those patrons age, and it will also allow them to retrieve or recover patrons who have stopped using the public library because of the limited range of books available in large print. ReadHowYouWant has the technology to make this practical by lowering the cost of large print editions.

A PDF of my presentation is here. If you want it in PowerPoint format, let me know.

Chris Stephens' Paper on Making Libraries Accessible for an Aging Population

Chris Stephen is the founder of ReadHowYouWant, and it is his vision of all books becoming accessible to all readers that drives the company. Here is a paper he recently presented at a conference on libraries and aging.

Microsoft Typography - Features of TrueType and OpenType

Microsoft Typography - Features of TrueType and OpenType

Thanks to Claudia Kelley, the excellent ergonomist of Washington State Labor and Industries, for telling me about MicroSoft's ClearType Tuner. It lets you fine-tune the screen fonts on your XP or later Windows computer so that they work best for your eyes. I installed and configured it in about 3 minutes, and it seems to be working correctly. The fonts actually do appear clearer on my screen. I can hardly wait to see how it works with TiresiasLP.

If anyone else tries this, please let me know how it works for you.

ReadHowYouWant featured in Australian Technology Showcase Newsletter

To quote:

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Louis Braille’s birth, accessible publishing innovator and ATS Alumni member Accessible Publishing Systems has released its braille and DAISY bookshop at www.readhowyouwant.com/braille. Accessible Publishing Systems began in 2008 to publish, in partnership with international publishers, large print book formats ranging from 16 to 24 point fonts, and to make it easy for them to service the visually impaired. Blind readers now have access to thousands of titles in braille.

“We’ve developed an XML software program that can mark up a book into a number of different accessible formats. This allows us to quickly and efficiently create braille and DAISY files and literally produce hundreds of books in the time it has taken others to just do a few titles,” says Christopher Stephen, Accessible Publishing System’s founder.

In other news, the company has announced that it has begun partnering with Random House Australia and Murdoch Books to create accessible editions of their best-selling titles.