Erasmus+ Audio Textbooks Project
The DAISY Consortium is currently participating in a multi-year, multi-partner project entitled “Audio Textbooks – Help for Challenged Readers and Their Teachers”.
The project supports students with dyslexia and other reading disabilities by providing them with digital books combining text, pictures, and audio in the DAISY format. By using various DAISY reading apps, pupils will be able to personalise the text size, colours, and fonts, and navigate around the books in flexible ways.
The lead partner is the Latvian Dyslexia Association, and other partners are Stredna priemyselna skola elektrotechnicka (Slovakia), Zdruzenje Na Gragani Kreator Kumanovo (The Republic of North Macedonia), Skaistgirio gimnazija (Lithuania) and Lietuvos akluju boblioteka (Lithuania).
The languages spoken in the participating countries do not have high quality text to speech options. The DAISY Consortium’s role in the project is to provide training and technical support in the production of schoolbooks with combined human voice, text, and images. Through online training sessions held on Zoom, the project participants have learned to use the free Tobi authoring tool from the DAISY Consortium. They are now busy creating audio textbooks that are used in their schools, for subjects including history and geography.
Most students with print disabilities such as dyslexia are offered very few options to help them access books. This project will explore the use of textbooks and other printed materials in DAISY format as an effective way of helping these underserved pupils, especially urgent in the time when many school lessons are affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. DAISY members Nota and Luisterpunt have offered to support the project participants by sharing information about their services for students with dyslexia, and how they encourage pupils to use accessible digital books for reading and learning.
The Audio Textbooks project is project number 2020-1-LV01-KA201-077533 under Erasmus+ (Key Action 2 – KA2). It will run from the beginning of September 2020 to the end of August 2023.
