Presented by Daniel Ainasoja in Paris at EEAF, June 8th, 2015. For over 12 years, Daniel has been working for non-profit organizations developing software and hardware tools to make newspapers and books accessible for the visually impaired and print disabled. Daniel presently works as an International Sales Manager at Pratsam, CEO at the open source organization Kolibre and CEO at the Association of Swedish Talking Newspapers in Finland.

1. Making newspapers accessible:
Production to playback
EEAF, Paris 8th
June 2015
Daniel Ainasoja

2. Presenter
Daniel Ainasoja
 International Sales Manager at Pratsam
 CEO of Finlands svenska taltidningsförening FSTF
(The Association of Swedish Talking Newspapers in Finland)
 CEO of Kolibre, a Finnish association developing
open source software with DAISY support
 Working 12 years developing tools to make newspapers
and books accessible for the visually impaired
 BSc in Telecommunications and former journalist

3. About Pratsam
Pratsam, founded in 2005
 Delivering talking newspapers via
the internet since 2005 in Finland
(organized by FSTF since 2013)
 Delivering talking books online
since 2009 for Celia, the national
library for the print disabled
 One million publications delivered,
5000 users in Finland
 Supporting DAISY standards

4. Case: FSTF
The challenge for the organization
 Nine newspapers, 2.500 issues published
every year, from 3 to 7 days a week
 Less volunteering readers, speech
synthesis (TTS) only way forward
 Need for a cost effective,
fast and smooth distribution
 Different playback applications
and devices for different needs

5. Production
Available digital newspaper content
Printed paper available as PDF documents
 Automatic conversion to DAISY does not give a good result
 Conversion done only manually with an OCR-program such
as ABBYY Finereader or Omnipage
Newspaper archived stories available in XML
 Not all articles, depending on discipline at the newspaper
 Sometimes messy: no headline, missing textblocks, etc
 No ads: deaths, births, product warnings missing

6. Production
Pratsam Producer
 Automated serverbased
content processing system
 Imports XML and PDF and
measures difference
 Presents a report on missing
words in XML content
 An effective tool to examine
quality of XML content

7. Production
Editing in MS Word
 Pratsam Producer exports
Word-documents with
structured content from each
newspaper
 TV- and radio listings imported
as XML from separate service
and included in the documents
 Missing ads, texts and headlines
added manually from PDF
 Seven employees working
part-time every morning

8. Production
TTS production
 Word ”manuscript”
uploaded to Pratsam
Producer (in the cloud)
when editing is ready
 TTS production with
DAISY Pipeline and
Acapela speech synthesis
 Automatic export to
cloudbased distribution
service Pratsam Server

9. Distribution
Pratsam Server solution
Both cloudbased and dedicated
server distribution
Standalone or integrated with
existing library systems
DAISY Online support
Statistics reports, logging
Watermarking optional
Scalable without limits

10. Distribution
Pratsam Server
admin
Admin interface in
webbrowser
Administration of
users, publications and
players
User pages where
users can login and
download content and
software

11. Playback
Pratsam Mobile
Pocket size player
Mobile network support
Battery operated
DAISY 2.02 and DAISY Online
Pratsam Reader App
Pyxima solution
DAISY and DAISY Online
Launch in Finland 2015

12. Playback
Pratsam Reader
Native Microsoft
Windows application
DAISY 2.02 and DAISY
Online
Built-in audio user
interface (no need for a
screenreader)
Keyboard shortcuts
Can be distributed
via e-mail

13. Playback
Pratsam Reader Web
No installation required
Uses a standard webbrowser
Supports Chrome, Safari,
Firefox, Internet Explorer
Works on Windows, Mac OSX,
Linux, iOS, Android
Works on mobile smartphones
and tablets
Supports DAISY 2.02

14. Playback
Pratsam Reader Web
Bookmarks
Nine shortcut keys to play,
pause, jump, open menu and
add bookmarks
Unique link to content
can be sent by e-mail to each
user
Can also be opened
from desktop icon or user
pages at Pratsam Server

15. Demo
Demo time

16. Overview

17. Thank you!
Merci!
Tack!
Kiitos!
Daniel Ainasoja
daniel@pratsam.com
www.pratsam.com