[IAEP] Texas Senate Bills 866 & 867 regarding dyslexia passed over the weekend

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On further thought, it seems to me that there should be two activities.

The first is a reader. At minimum it should read plain text, PDF and
EPUB files. The Read activity fulfils this requirement. An additional
feature would be text-to-speech, with word highlighting (as Read
ETexts has). In this way, you can run TTS on any source file.

The second is a fetcher. It allows searching through different
pre-defined repositories, and the selected book can be downloaded to
the journal. The Get Books activity fulfils this requirement. Files
opened from the journal open up in the reader. An additional feature
would be to add additional source repositories (similar to how
Software Update works). This will allow deployments to create their
own catalogues of books and make them available online.

I think it's important to split the reading from the fetching to avoid
having an overly complicated activity. The journal is the means by
which they connect.

What do people think of this idea?

Sridhar


On 29 May 2011 04:07, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> Yes, I was working trying to merge the code in Get Books and Read
> activities.
> Now, you can read "plain text" files in Read, and Get Books can download
> books from
> Feedbooks and Internet Archive.
> A missing part is download books from Gutenberg project.
>
> Gonzalo
>
> On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at laptop.org.au>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 28 May 2011 04:36, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Marilyn,
>> >
>> > I wrote an Activity called Read Etexts that might be of some use to
>> > you.  It can take one of the "plain text" files put out by Project
>> > Gutenberg and read it aloud, like a Kindle.  As it reads the words it
>> > highlights the word spoken.  The highlighting needs a faster computer
>> > than an XO to keep up with the word being spoken, but it doesn't need
>> > to be much faster.
>> >
>> > http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035
>> >
>> > James Simmons
>>
>> This activity looks like it could have some real potential in our
>> deployments.
>>
>> It seems like there's a lot of functionality crossover between Read
>> Etexts, Get Internet Archive Books (your code) and Get Books (based on
>> Get Internet Archive Books). Are there any thoughts about a merger? A
>> reader that could pull content and vocalise the words from all of the
>> sources supported by Get Books (plus external files) would be
>> fantastic!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sridhar
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