OU niggles
Up til now I’ve had my OU books as real books but also as tapes. Now, the tapes are lovely, tend to get spread all over the place but still, lovely. I can settle down comfortably with a tape player, some headphones and listen whilst I follow in the book which means I get through the text way, way faster than just reading it.
But the RNIB, who produce all the tapes for the OU, have decided to move with the times and start supplying stuff as "Daisy books" instead. These are nifty little CD things where the text is read by a computer voice but you need the right "decoding" software or player to access them.
Now, I have software that will do it on my PC but really, really I would prefer not to have to do all my studying on a hard chair at a cluttered desk (and yes, I know, I could declutter but let’s face it, it’s not going to happen… and my chair will still be hard!) But the portable readers are £££ and somehow I don’t think that the OU will provide me with one as I have an adequate alternative. So this could be the last year I get the luxury of studying in comfort or away from my desk (so at camp, at Oulton etc) unless I fork out about £300.
Grump.
Tell them.
Comment by michelle — March 7, 2008 @ 5:37 pm
yup, they might well listen.
Comment by Jax — March 7, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
from today’s Guardian. Dunno if it is helpful or not at all
Can you please tell me how I can record listen again radio programmes on to audiotape to play in the car?
There are complicated ways you could go about this but the easiest method is to buy a cassette adaptor, a tape shaped gizmo that connects to the headphone jack on your music player and slides into your car’s cassette deck. This means you can download podcasts, transfer them to an MP3 player and then play them back when driving. Popular Belkin and Sony models cost about £7.
Comment by michelle — March 8, 2008 @ 6:11 pm
Annoying, but I can kinda see why they have gone for the Daisy route - I can see it being esp. useful for text book type things, esp. for blind people who don’t have the option of referring back to the real book at all.
but surely there are ways of getting the audio out of it into an MP3? (at the crudest you can play audio of any sort back and then use software that just captures the soundcard output) Then I’d get a cheapo MP3 player and listen to them via that
Comment by DaddyBean — March 9, 2008 @ 1:04 am
How did i miss this?
The main reason I like audio books is because I can listen to them in bed, whilst resting my eyes, and not with the lap top fan whirling at me!
Oh well at least the RNIB are still providing us with them, a few years ago they were talking about withdrawing them for dyslexic (scoptic) students, as we dont have a sight problem!
Comment by vicki — March 14, 2008 @ 12:08 am
Daddy Bean, yes, I’ve thought of that option, would be a bit long drawn out but still, better than nothing! would also mean that I could edit stuff from different sources together I suppose (saves me faffing about swicthing from the text book to the “soruce book” etc) it’s just all down to the time thing again, I’m hopeless at managing it, don’t have enough of it and when I do get 5 minutes peace I’m too knackered to enjoy it!
Comment by Administrator — March 14, 2008 @ 9:27 am
Vicki - if you aren’t currently studying you won’t have got the letter so taht’s how you missed it. It did worry me that the aplication form wants proof of how blind I am and doesn’t have a check box for “I can see fine, but those darned words just keep doing a dance when I try to read them”
Comment by Administrator — March 14, 2008 @ 9:29 am