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Subject: Re: DAISY (was: Re: New players for the blind and Rockbox?)

Re: DAISY (was: Re: New players for the blind and Rockbox?)

From: Daniel Weck via rockbox <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2020 15:02:11 +0000

I agree with your analysis.
Rather than trying to "fit a square peg into a round hole" (i.e. implement
all the costly runtime processing directly on resource-limited Rockbox
devices), a better approach would be for a companion script to execute on
the computer that the Rockbox device connects to in order to transfer music
/ audio files. The goal of such script would be to reduce the complexity of
certain types of multimedia content (i.e. reduce publications and
audiobooks to their essential components, such as navigation via Table Of
Contents, Page Numbers, etc.), and to optimise the generated format for
consumption on low-end Rockbox devices (e.g. no XML parser requirement, and
removal of features which are not realistically exploitable / usable on
Rockbox devices due to form-factor, user interface, resources, etc.).
By the way, DAISY publications come in different flavours, mainly:
text-only (in which case Text To Speech can be used to read the content
aloud), synchronised text+audio (in which case the pre-recorded narration
ships as standard audio files), or audio-only (well, with accompanying
navigation structure and semantics). The same reasoning applies to EPUB
publications too.
Daniel

On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 at 13:18, Solomon Peachy via rockbox <
rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 11:39:31AM +0100, Arno Schuh via rockbox wrote:
> > 10 years ago I asked for a DAISY feature in Rockbox. Daniel Weck replied
> as
> > follows:
>
> What feature would that be, specifically?
>
> DAISY is a large, complex specification, and at first blush it appears
> that beyond improved navigation possibilities, there is very little that
> would be applicable/relevant to Rockbox.
>
> Furthermore, we lack a built-in text-to-speech engine or sort of rich
> text viewer, and even our most modern targets are surprisingly resource
> constrained. This leads to the situation that Daniel described, where
> we are unable to take advantage of existing third-party
> code/implementations to add new features/capabilities.
>
> I suspect the most viable approach would be some PC-side tool to take a
> DAISY-compliant document (or pre-recorded audiobook) and pre-process or
> otherwise render it into a simpler format that Rockbox can then use to
> provide DAISY's improved navigation features.
>
> Would I like to see DAISY (and native TTS) capabilities added? Of
> course! But at the end of the day there are currently fewer folks
> actively contributing to Rockbox now than there were when you first
> asked about DAISY, so without additional resources, I wouldn't expect
> any progress on this front.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Solomon
> --
> Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org
> (email&xmpp)
> _at_pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix)
> High Springs, FL speachy (freenode)
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Received on 2020-11-20

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