Online Digital Talking Book Technology with Web and Mobile Clients

A Project Report Presented to
The Faculty of the College of Engineering San Jose State University
In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Science in Software Engineering

By Tanakom Talawat
December 2007

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Chapter 1. Project Overview

Introduction

As we all know that information and knowledge are very important for everyone even for people with disability. There are many types of disability that human is facing nowadays. Each type of impairment has the specific difficulties of accessibility to information, for example, the blind has the accessible problem about visualization. However, the useful assistive technologies can practically help the handicap people to access groups of information by converting undetectable sections to imperceptible sections. In the blind case, the technology for converting from text to speech is very helpful for them. Unfortunately, the information has been stored in difference formats and locations. Most of them are available in the internet but the useful knowledge still has been commercially stored in the paper-based book which is hardly accessible for the blind.

There is a published standard for formatting the paper-based book to be a Digital Talking Book format (DTB) called DAISY, Digital Accessible Information System [1]. With this standard, the blind can thoroughly access all contents in the book. However, there is a remaining problem about the book distribution. Like paper-based book, the digital talking book format currently uses the circulation method in person for borrowing and returning.

The main objective of this project is to increase availability of the Digital Talking Book by making them online. Therefore, the blind can access favorite Digital Talking Books on demand from their home using a computer and high speed internet connection.

Proposed Areas of Study and Academic Contribution

Proposed Areas of Study

This research and development project has involved in many software technologies. Each technology has obviously involved in the difference layer of software. The table below clearly shows the relationship between the software layers and areas of study in this project.

Table 1: The relationship between the software layers and areas of study

Each technology which is used in this project will be described in detail in the Chapter 3, Technology Description. In this project, I have not only design and implement the web application using multi-technologies, but I also learned how to integrate all technologies together. Some technologies, like ASP.NET and RIA, Rich Internet Application, have been produced by a commercial company; for example, Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. Some technologies, like XML and MP3 audio compression, have been designed and created by independent organizations. In order to achieve the goal of this project, I have to blend all of these technologies from multiple organizations to impeccably work in the single environment.

Beyond the areas of study mentioned in the table above, this project also has taken advantages of the software development process for project management. There are four main processes used as keystones in this project including, collecting the requirements, designing the solution, coding the program, and testing the product. However, the most interesting in this project is to make the website accessible and intuitive enough for the blind to access and control book reading with unaccompanied person.

Current State of the Art

As mentioned in the previous header, this project involves in numerous technologies and processes. In addition, the successful implementation of this project will also benefit to the academic areas. This project mainly aims to distribute Digital Talking Books (DTBs) over the internet by using high speed internet connection. Distributed books are included all types of books that volunteer already read and recorded. Some libraries already have academic books in the Digital Talking Book format for their members to borrow. However, I believe that all types of published books can be a part of contribution to academic study. Moreover, our user groups which are the blind, people with print-disability (vision impaired people, seniors) or people with learning disability (Dyslexia with reading) have less opportunity to access paper-based book. This project has increased their chance to expose the largest source of knowledge directly from their home on demand.

The academic contribution of this project is not limited only for handicap people. It is also benefic to language learner group. Since the Digital Talking Book standard (DAISY) was used in this project is the international standard [1]. Blind library in most countries used this standard to produce the Digital Talking Book in their language. Therefore, language learner group can earn benefit from this software through studying the pronunciation and watching the synchronized text of many languages from blind libraries that implement this project around the world.

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