backplane audio rendering possibilities

aloha, charles!

i've been thinking a lot about the backplane playing of pure 
audio events, and i think i have 2 avenues that you might be 
able to persue to effect this...


1) American Printing House for the Blind (APH)
   http://www.aph.org/

APH makes and distributes the incredible BookPort - a DTB, MP3
Audible-capable, built in TTS engine (english and spanish), 
can parse .brl (btaille-formatted files), and, of course, 
plain text.

http://sun1.aph.org/products/bp_bro.html

The interface through which one downloads content to the 
BookPort is a program named "Book Port Transfer" (BPT); if 
you are perusing a list of supported files, it uses a preview 
pane to display the information contained in the file, AND 
if it is an audio file, BPT actually plays the file, without 
any helper apps.

recently, however, despite not being told that RealPlayer was 
or is necessary to play previews, but the other day, i 
inadvertently opened an audible (.aa) file, and suddenly, 
RealPlayer popped up, asking for my audible authentification 
info -- next time i was in BPT perusing my audible downloads, 
RealPlayer didn't pop-up and begin playing the file, but the 
file was audibly previewable in BPT.  at no time during the 
installation was i informed that i needed or asked if i already 
had RealPlayer installed on my system, but that may be because 
it inspected my stystem to ascertain if RealPlayer was already 
installed and it was a moot point...  i know you'd probably 
prefer to use an open source audio renderer, but in the interim, 
RealPlayer is available on all the platforms you support, 
right?


2) webbIE - http://www.webbie.org.uk/

webbIE is a web suite for blind/low vision users; it includes 
a live radio player, an accessible interface for the BBC's 
"Listen Again" programs (the player on the BBC site is 
horrendous from an accessibility point-of-view) by using the 
RealPlayer engine (so having RealPlayer on your system is 
required) to render audio through an extremely accessible 
interface.

it also has an RSS feed manager, a podcatcher, a language 
selector (currently, i believe there are 8 or 9 supported 
languages), and - perhaps coolest of all, from an avid 
reader's perspective - a project gutenburg library that 
allows one to obtain and read gutenburg without having to 
go through the far more complex gutenburg web interface; 
it provides accessible listings and searching, and keeps 
books in a cache -- it alone is worth downloading webbIE 
(which, as its name suggests, reuses iexplore.exe to 
deliver a more accessible UI and to show the page as 
rendered by IE -- it has a text-only option whose rendering
of web contet is very similar to the late (and-oft-lamented) 
pwWebSpeak

gregory.

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Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 16:28:07 UTC