Accessible Publishing: AVH, the French association for the visually impaired is making the new book season accessible to everyone.

Novels that make the news are available in an audio version at the same time as printed books, by the AVH – with Acapela’s voice.

With the recent introduction in its digital library ‘Éole’ of audio books in Daisy format read by Acapela’s synthetic voice, AVH can now very quickly make new titles available to its users. Synthetic voice enables written content to be vocalized rapidly. The case is made by the availability this week on Éole’s shelves of no less than 30 novels just off the printing press.

‘The use of new technologies like synthetic voice allows us to keep up with what’s happening in literature and offers our users the very latest novels that everyone is talking about; without delay. It’s a big first that we are proud of. The resulting audio is very pleasant and the borrowing rate for titles vocalized by synthetic voices, available for two months now, is very encouraging’ said Fernando Pinto da Silva, from the AVH.

‘The vocalization of audio books is a key topic for us. We are very happy to be the vocal partner of AVH and to contribute to this project that  perfectly illustrates the power of speech synthesis to make content accessible very quickly to everyone. We hope the natural audio result will appeal to AVH users’ commented Antoine Kauffeisen, Director of Marketing, Acapela Group.

The offer of audio books read with a synthetic voice is an additional service, but does not reduce the number of books produced each year by AVH recorded with a human voice. All the titles for this new season will soon be available as audio books recorded by actors. Registration at the media library Valentin Hauy and the borrowing of audio books is free, via download or CD.

To listen to extracts read by Alice, the Acapela synthetic voice selected by AVH to vocalize literary works, just click on the links below:

• Extract n°1: ‘les anges meurent de nos blessures’, Yasmina Khadra (2.11 min)
• Extract n°2: ‘Canada’, Richard Ford (2.01 min)
• Extract n°3: ‘L’échange des princesses’, Chantal Thomas (2.21 min)
• Extract n°4: La nostalgie heureuse’, Amélie Nothomb (0.47 min)
• Extract n°5: ‘Le quatrième mur’, Sorj Chalandon (2.17 min)

 

Click on the links for more information about the AVH and Éole