hi nifl-tech community,
    
    for the past few months i've been working on a small project to create a
freely distributable narrated version of helen keller's autobiography.  other
people have done the heavy lifting on this project.

     maria uther, a volunteer with librivox.org, did a superb job with the
narration back in 2006. a teen in the community where i work, abreham, tsefaye,
chopped up this narration into 232 one minute segments -- using the free
Audacity audio recording and editing program.

      i'm now reassembling that audio with the associated text in a nice large
font -- using the free windows program called powerbullet, which creates flash
slideshows for the web. the resulting slideshow can be viewed online -- or
off-line, with any computer from the past 10 years that has macromedia flash on it.

     a newspaper in the washington dc-area printed a nice write-up of this
project at 

     see http://tinyurl.com/ypjpqj

       you can view the beginnings of the fruits of this project as a flash file at

      http://helenkellerbio.blogspot.com

            i'm doing the layout of the text screens using openoffice.org draw
program -- creating a jpeg graphics for each screen. if there's anyone here on
this list who would like to pitch in to help with this last stage, thanks for
sending me an email off-list.  i would send you 10 one minute mp3 files and then
you'd create the associated text screens for these using openoffice.org draw.

             i can coach you thru the process, which is fairly easy, but a bit
time consuming.

              the resulting final project will be accessible from the internet
archive and will be downloadable as a single zipped file for free distribution
via usb flash drives, cd-roms, refurbished computers, etc. 

               phil shapiro
               washington dc

-- 
Phil Shapiro  pshapiro at his.com
http://www.his.com/pshapiro/briefbio.html
http://philsrssfeed.blogspot.com
http://www.his.com/pshapiro/stories.menu.html

"Wisdom starts with wonder." - Socrates
"Learning happens through gentleness."