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APH News & Press

Small hand-held device lets those who are blind or visually impaired enjoy electronic books - anywhere and anytime

Want to read a digital recorded book or other electronic file while going for a walk or riding to work? Small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, APH's new Book Port^TM handles both text-to-speech and digital audio with ease. You can even use it as a recorder to make notes about the material you read.

The accompanying software, USB connector, and compact Flash card make it possible to quickly load music or text into Book Port. If you have a scanner and optical character recognition software, you can scan your own books or other material and load them into this handy device.

Kentucky Educator, Will Smith, likes Book Port because it lets you "carry a few hundred books and a dependable reader in your shirt pocket!"

Book Port's many features that are particularly useful to students and professionals who are blind are listed on the enclosed brochure and on the APH web site. Among them are:

• Braille Reverse Translation that lets the user directly read Web Braille and other contracted braille files
• The ability to navigate through spoken word audio content with three levels of pause detection means the user can move through a book by sentence, paragraph, and section, even in raw audio files with no kind of markup.

Book Port meets the standards of the DAISY* Consortium.. It works with DAISY 2.x Digital Talking Books like those available from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFBD)^® and with DAISY 3.0 Digital Talking Books like those from National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Bookshare.org.

*DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) refers to a globally recognized standard developed to facilitate the creation of accessible document content.

Visit the APH web site, www.aph.org. or call 800-223-1839 to order. A downloadable sample and more information about Book Port can be found at www.aph.org/tech/bp_info.htm.

Contact Roberta Williams, Public Affairs and Special Projects Manager, for more information. Telephone: 1 -800-223-1839 or (502) 895-2405; e-mail: rwilliams@aph.org