Hi,
I have just taken delivery of the PTR1 daisy recorder from Plextalk,
and I think this will be of grate help in people with reading
disabilities such as VI or dislexia.
First of all, the unit has quite a moderately high price tag; £595
from the RNIB plus £2.50 for postage charge. However, it can do a
lot, and I am certainly glad I spent the money on this item.
What can it do?
It can play daisy books, audio cds and mp3 cds. This basicly means it
can play digital books released from the RNIB or other organisations
on CD, and if the relevant information is tagged into the book, you
can jump specificly to a set page number, and or heading in the book.
What makes this stand out from other similar players though are the
bookmark facilities. This player supports annotated bookmarks, using
your voice for annotation. For example, one problem I have is that I
have to have a book on tape, and then a set of notes giving the
chapter, and a rough position of where the particular part is on tape,
then the note. With this, however, I just navigate to the position I
want to create a note, press a few buttons, and record the note in my
own voice. This is then played back when I reach the position again,
or I can jump directly to that section.
In practical terms, there are hardly any non-fiction daisy books yet,
but this is rapidly changing, and due to the portability of daisy
books, I can only see the system growing in the next few years.
The system can also record daisy titles onto CDR/CDRW disks, and also
onto compact flash using a PCMCIA adaptor. In practical terms, this
means that a student can record lecture notes, or get a reader to
record a book, either using the built in or external microphone. Up
to 90 hours may be recorded on a CDRW, and of course this can be split
up into multiple lectures etc. As with the standard book reader,
recorded books are treated like any other Daisy title, and you can
bookmark these with voice annotations. Although I have not tried this
in a lecture room, the results will be very similar to current tape
recordings with a good microphone.
The recorder can also record audio cds for music recording also,
however, I have not tried this feature yet.
The unit is the size of a print book, and is of the thickness of a
medium hardback.
I am certainly very impressed with the device so far, and hope you
found this useful.
The unit can be found at <www.plextalk.org> - go to the Europe link
and you will see the PTR1 device.
If you want to read more on the Daisy standard, go to <www.daisy.org>.
Andrew.
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Andrew Hodgson, Bromyard, Herefordshire, UK.
Email: [log in to unmask]
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