Auditory Accessibility of Metadata in Books: A Design for All Approach

There are two issues that are challenging in the life-cycle of Digital Talking Books (DTB): the automatic labeling of text formatting meta-data in documents and the multimodal representation of the text formatting semantics. We propose an augmented design-for-all approach for both the production and the reading processes of DAISY compliant DTBs. This approach incorporates a methodology for the real-time extraction and the semantic labeling of text formatting meta-data. Furthermore, it includes a unified approach for the multimodal rendering of text formatting, structure and layout meta-data by utilizing a Document-to-Audio platform to render the acoustic modality.