new demo available of talking book format

[Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>]

When President Clinton went on his "Digital Divide - as it affects people with
disabilities" tour back in the fall, the American Foundation for the Blind
demonstrated a sample of the new technology that the DAISY Consortium has been
developing for taking books.  The sample -- which is Martin Luther King's "I
Have a Dream" speech, is now available for download from

<http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp>http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp

The downloadable release was announced in the middle of a meeting today as we
(I am assisting a team working under the aegis of the National Information
Standards Organization) are working on pushing this technology along to become
a world wide standard for these books.

Along with T.V. Raman's EmacSpeak, the talking book is a seasoned, thoroughly
proven effective information browsing interface for people who are blind or
have low vision (and also some other reading difficulties).  The DAISY work
updates the medium to the twenty-first century.  This is one of a number of
benchmark information interfaces that are important for understanding the
design space for a universally usable Grid Computing Environment.

Al