Daisy2go: revolution or rework?
March 14th, 2009Alongside version 4 of their market leading accessibility suite for Symbian-based mobile phones, Nuance Communications have included “DAISY2go”, a software player for DAISY material. At a similar time, they have announced an upcoming screen reader for the Windows Mobile platform: so is this DAISY player a sign that Symbian won’t be left behind? or a peace offering for those who haven’t converted from what has up until now dominated the mobile market?
It seems too early to be certain as to their intentions - anything I might come up with would be pure guesswork. What we can work on as fact is the way this DAISY software works, though - here are my thoughts.
Installing is a fairly standard process, and I suppose by now I should be used to applications weighing in at over 600 KB. The first time I ran the program I got a prompt saying that my bookshelf was empty, asking if I wanted to add any titles. Choosing “yes” yielded a fairly standard “browse for folder” type affair, which enabled me to choose my memory card thence specifying a particular folder. I chose my books directory which contained a talking book from the RNIB, a hybrid Audio and Text title which I downloaded from the web and two Bookshare files (one older format, one newer). there was also a book in pure MP3 format (i.e. no DAISY markup, no text, no anything other than audio).
OF these, only the first 2 were recognised. The text audio combi was produced 2 years ago, and the RNIB title in 2003. I can therefore only assume that newer formats (such as those employed by Bookshare) are as yet unrecognised by this software. The folder of mp3’s was unsurprisingly ignored.
Of the found titles, I was able to mark/unmark at my hearts content. adding them to my shelf required a detour into the options menu (the call key or even select would have sufficed for a default action), but alas, the shortcut was not to be. They might’ve even arranged the menu so that add comes before the mark menu, but I suppose you do need to select a title before you can add it: in that, at least, I understand the logic, even if I don’t agree with it.
When all’s added, a bookshelf screen allowed me to choose any of my added titles. In doing so, a table of content (not contents”, but “content”) for the chosen title is displayed. Any company with communications in its name should surely speak proper English - but I digress.
The content view is a collapsed tree - assuming the book has any sort of navigation markup, that is. my RNIB title had no such markup and so I was presented with a list of the book’s title and 30-some short stories. Each was named reasonably well, and I happen to know that each was a level 1 heading in the DAISY source material. I could navigate this list with my cursor, it wrapped when I reached either end, and pressing 0 returned me to the top. Quite useful, although had there been 300 short stories rather than 30 I might have craved letter navigation, but I suppose the theoretical structural benefits of DAISY make this unnecessary.
Predictably, hitting select on any given short story starts the audio playing at the appropriate juncture. I also happen to know that, in this particular instance, the short story collection came from a commercial CD and had one MP3 file per disk. The DAISY markup specified in what file and at what time each story started, which is the only reason I was using this particular book in DAISY format in the first place. if I Rip from CD, I like to do it by chapters, parts, stories - whatever medium lends itself to the material. The RNIB clearly had no such compunction in this case, but from a listeners viewpoint (if you’ll pardon the mixing of terminology) the effect is largely the same.
The quality of the audio was unimpeachable - slightly tinny, perhaps, when compared to the Victor Stream - a failing of my handset’s audio output more than the software, though. up until now I’d not seen a DAISY player without tone control, but it’s not a feature I miss. I adjust each time I buy a new set of headphones, when I move from using a headset to an earpiece, from laptop to television or Book Courier to Mp3 player. Adjusting to the particular timbre of my phone takes no more effort than anything else and I don’t really know why I’m rambling on about it. A further tap of select pauses the audio, and the responsiveness of the application is hardly lightning but certainly more impressive than some applications I’ve used, especially those that deal with Symbian’s audio system (it paused faster than Nokia’s standard music player, for instance).
The hash or pound key is supposed to cycle through the application’s views, namely “content”, “play view” and “text”. content we’ve already briefly mentioned (although we’ll be back for a discussion of trees). play view allows you to choose how you want to navigate the book (heading 1, phrase, page etc), and text view is where you can read the text portion of an appropriately marked-up DAISY title. In theory, all is well - but on certain handsets (like mine), there’s a bit of a technical snafu.
Some phones have dropped the Edit (or ABC) key from their keypads. I’m using a Nokia 6120 classic, and my fiancee Kim has a Nokia n78. In both instances, there’s no edit key (which used to double as the Talks key). This has some far-ranging implications, the most severe of which I discovered was the complete inability to use Mobile Speak’s modifier features. Both screen readers for phones intercept a single key for their functions - kind of like a JAWS or NVDA key, if you will - and I never got mobile speak to use a key that was actually available on my handset. That aside, if I want to mark items in a list now, rather than tapping “edit” I press the hash. If I want to highlight some text in an edit field to copy to my clipboard, I hold the hash, cursor to highlight, release, then access a menu (either through pressing Star or through the specific app’s options menu). What they’ve done is take away Edit, and spread its features through the hash and star keys respectively. Doubling a few keys up in various instances, but reducing the overall number of keys on the handset. Nifty. Talks doesn’t complain either - it shifts itself to the menu key and although this does mean a double tap whenever I want the phone’s main menu, its a small price to pay and has become something of an engrained reflex.
Back on topic then - what do you suppose happens if I’m in a list (which the play view is) and I press hash, wanting to navigate elsewhere? The phone thinks I’m selecting something. Select resume’s playback, remember? So that doesn’t really work very well. Quite why select-as-play and select-as-selection mean the same thing is anyone’s guess, but I can think of no other meaning for the odd quirk.
That issue aside, it’s possible (with judicious juggling of the menus) to get to wherever you want, view-wise. Selecting an item from the content view puts you into the text if your book has it, and from there, hash for play view always seems to work. getting back to text is a bit of a risky business, but despite that, the system is reasonably robust.
So here we were, if you’ll remember, listening to a random short story. The audio was sounding good, but came on quite loudly. What can we do about that, you might ask? well the obvious answer is turn it down, and that’s quite correct. Both handsets I’ve tested with have purpose-built volume control keys - most do. if not, a long-press of cursor up and down does the same thing. Volume is independent of the screen reader - it’s like having a multi-channel sound card in the palm of your hand.
Whilst playing, tapping my left and right cursor keys jumped me forward by phrase. Quite what constitutes a phrase is debatable, but each phrase is so specified in the DAISY markup. this particular book allowed phrase and heading 1 navigation with the latter taking me between short stories. You can choose how you want to navigate with cursor up and down from Play view, which is respected even if you keep your focus in the content view.
Another hallmark of DAISY players is the ability to adjust the speed of the audio. have Nuance left this one out, I asked myself? is it, like tone, a feature considered unnecessary? the answer, fortunately, is no. The 4, 5 and 6 keys of the numeric keypad let you adjust the speed of the playing audio. 5 (being midway between the other two keys) resets the speed to its default. 6 increases, 4 decreases. it’s a very Un-victor-like interface: no beeps, no announcement of what speed your on, no great clunking sound when you hit 0, just a minor audio hiccup sometimes and the speech continuing at its new pace.
I’m going to take up another paragraph talking about speed because it’s a feature of DAISY devices that I find useful. It’s something of a catch22 that the more I listen to synthetically-read books, the more I want to have a good narrator read me an audio title. yet conversely, the more titles I buy, beg or borrow, the more vexed I become with the speed (or lack of) on the narrator’s part. Because my synthesizer can hammer out hundreds of words per minute, I want the narrator to do the same - I find absorbing information at most “normal” reading speeds to be painfully slow, probably as a direct result of the speech synthesizer in the first place. DAISY2go handles speed adjustment, which is lucky for me and a boon to many others. Compared to the Victor Stream (which Kim has), the faster speeds are certainly not as polished-sounding and the slower ones distort some. However I have to concede that my handset at least has quite a small amount of Ram and a fairly slow processor. Any sort of speed at all is preferable to none, and that it’s handled smoothly enough to be listenable is a testament to the ingenuity of whomever programmed the algorithm. Speed, like volume, is retained across sessions (not titles).
Let us depart from my short story collection for a while, remembering that we are now midway through a story, and turn to another title on my shelf. I tested, for illustrative purposes, the agenda of an ACB conference from 2007. This was my “hybrid” title, produced by the Wyoming Medical Center with open source DAISY generation software and containing both audio (in the form of prerecorded, synthetic speech), and text.
Opening this title, as before, landed me on the Content view. this time, however, a little icon next to the focused item told me that there were items inside, or beneath the heading, or however you’d like to picture it. Talks did not read this icon and, either because I had a Beta of Talks 4 installed or because someone got lazy, I had to label it myself. No hardship, but unnerving if you’re not expecting it and your book seems to be missing a few levels.
Expanding any particular heading is a simple matter of pressing the right-arrow key. Headings beneath are then exposed, and if they themselves contain sub-headings, you can open those up in the same way. pressing left takes you back up the tree until you eventually reach your starting point. Pressing select on any heading starts audio playback, per usual.
The difference with this title is that it contains text, of course - so as the audio plays, the appropriate words are highlighted alongside the speech. How much use this is going to be in practice I don’t know - I’ve never known anyone use a phone academically (not without some nefarious purpose anyway). In any event you can stop the audio with select, navigate the text with your cursor, and if you then press select (whilst at a different point in the text) the audio picks up from that point. Similarly, your place in the table of content is matched to wherever you happen to be, so if you started playback at chapter 1, paused audio and navigated midway through chapter 2 with text then pressed play, the audio would resume at chapter 2 and you’d be on chapter 2 (or its appropriate sub-heading) in the contents as well. Everything is synchronized so that your position in the title is guaranteed, which is another staple of DAISY software and generally a useful tool.
It’s also worth noting that talks does not read the text whilst the audio is playing, even though parts of it highlight to sync with the speech. This is probably good. On the other hand, if you’re reading without audio and just cursoring through the text, you’ve got no way of knowing you’ve moved from one heading to another. The title of the heading is part of the text flow, but there’s nothing (that Talks notices at least) to set it out from any other part of the text. Not having any site, nor any way to determine font information with talks, I cannot tell you if the heading is visually distinguishable from paragraph text in text view, but would imagine it to be either larger, coloured differently or rendered in a different style. For those curious, a “say all” does seem to perform a successful continuous read operation and, if you stop reading with a keypress, your position is maintained.
let us now turn to my directory of Mp3 files. I recorded them from tape some years ago, there are 4 tracks (one per side of cassette) and I haven’t the tools nor desire to turn them into DAISY just to play them with appropriate software. Luckily I don’t have to -because the alternative to adding a “book” to your bookshelf is to “DAISY-FY” material.
No changes are made to the files themselves; I assume DAISY2go simply amends its virtual bookshelf to add the files you specify. browsing is as easy as it is for adding any normal book, and you can choose to sort the added files by artist, album, filename etc. What I found particularly odd was that DAISY2go read the artist tag (which it used as the author when listing my book), but prompted me for a title, rather than using the Album tag. even had it given me album as a default and allowed me to change it, that would’ve been preferable, given that when recording tapes I set the “title” field of my ID3 tags to the book’s title plus tape or side number, and the “album” field to simply the name of the book. Content from iTunes, audible etc surely uses Album in the same way, and if the software can read the artist tag, then it certainly has the potential to read the album.
That issue aside, my bookshelf now contains DAISY books and my other title, which shows up on the bookshelf in precisely the same way as a normal DAISY book. Pressing select once again takes me to a content view, and because I sorted by filename, I expand the first tree element (which is the artist) and therein find my files (01 to 04). They are identified in the list by their ID3 title tags, but sorted by filename (which means that they go “01, 02,” not “1, 10″). Pressing select yields the same high-fidelity audio, the same fine speed and volume adjustment. The same level of navigation? unfortunately not…
Almost all DAISY hardware I’ve seen plays standard Mp3 as well as DAISY. Mp3 has no markup for “phrase” navigation, so what the sensible systems do is to take an arbitrary value (say five seconds) and jump through the file in that amount. DAISY2go seems to shirk this approach in favour of bouncing you to the next or previous file in your book - which in my case means I hop a whole forty-five minutes of audio with a single keypress. By no means an ideal solution, I’m sure you’ll agree. If I’d wanted to jump a whole file I would have either gone to content view and selected the file of my choice, or chosen level 1 navigation - which, minus any DAISY indication, means to move by file.
On the plus side, we’re given two more methods of navigation. Holding down the left or right cursor lets us jabber through the file as with an old tape player. You can choose just how fast (from 2 to 16 times speed ) you want to hop, and optionally can have a beep when you move from one element to another. For instance if I’m winding backward and I move from the beginning of file 2 to the end of file 1, I hear a cute little beep to inform me of the move. There’s also a “jump” feature, theoretically allowing you to input a time or percentage to move to. I have yet to make this work, however - I read mostly fiction though so I don’t mind very much.
In essence, that’s pretty much it. The settings of the application allow you to resume books where you leave off, but if you don’t set it up before you start playing there’s no way of getting back to where you were upon application restart. The options for auto-resume are Yes, No and Ask, Nuance might want to have defaulted it to Ask from the start so that people don’t have to go fiddling just to continue their reading.
As to my overall thoughts on the application? I have to say I’m impressed. The power of anything like this always amazes me, given the low memory footprints of mobile devices. there are a few niggling issues - the settings could have been defaulted a little better, the ID3 tag support is sloppy and the phrase navigation should really do what it says on the tin - but apart from that, this little gem does what it does reasonably well. For me especially, now that I can speed up my audio material without having to buy additional hardware, I’ll certainly be listening more. The sheer amount of output possibilities on mobile phones (bluetooth headsets, standard headphones, Fm transmission etc) means that a device I carry with me constantly just doubled up as a useful audio book player too. Symbian is very flexible and given that I also have a decent e-text reader, there’s very little reason why I’d need to use anything else for my pleasure reading.
not all is sunshine and flowers, though. We have to remember that Nuance are certainly not the first off the bat when it comes to a DAISY application for mobile phones. As mentioned in Graham, Ron. “Code Factory releases DAISY reader for Symbian mobile phones Access Ability.” 08/12/2008 14 Mar 2009, Code Factory (maker’s of Mobile Speak) had one out first. what’s more, theirs does more than Nuance’s - voice bookmarks over plain old text ones, automatic Bookshare integration, and probably more customisation of text formatting.
It seems to me that this is going to go the same way as their screen readers - i.e. however better the Code Factory offering may be, Talks (with its dominating market share) will win out. nuance are giving their DAISY reader away with Talks 4, but as yet haven’t announced any payment information for buying it as a stand alone application. Why would someone like myself bother to buy something when I can get a very similar product as part of my phone’s screen reader? The answer is I wouldn’t, of course - and I suspect for the majority of talks users that answer is the same.
To conclude: an impressive bit of software, but nothing new. I’m impressed, but then I’d never even used Code Factory’s offering and so it was new to me. Hopefully they’ll add more DAISY formats - bookshare support would probably be useful for the Americans and a little integration with the RNIB’s streaming service would be nice. That aside, quite how useful DAISY is on a phone (or DAISY is in general) remains to be established. I plan on using this software for audio titles (be they DAISY or standard Mp3), and that’s all. even so, a great resource and a useful tool for those of us too hard-up to afford portable DAISY hardware.