This would be a collaborative project between a number of universities to get students to copy and paste novels and short stories into excel documents, in hierarchical format - as a way for them to study the literature, and as an open source way of formatting the literature to make it more accessible to people who are blind or have learning disabilities.

Having a book divided into increments would make it more accessible to people who use screen readers or have difficulty reading printed or digital text visually.

The reader could skip through the audio of the text in increments, navigating by chapter or paragraph or sentence. This would make reading audio text more like reading visual text - where the reader has more of a choice of when to stop reading to allow comprehension to catch up.

The fomatted versions could be made available to google or a google-like search system, so that the most used and useful ones would rise to the top of the search results.

column A, row 1 -- the book title
column B row 2 -- the first chapter title
column C row 3 -- the first paragraph first sentence
column D row 3 -- the first paragraph second sentence, etc.

Then a simple system for reading them could be developed - a simple open source spreadsheet with a screen reading voice and maybe a hand held reading device with volume, speed, and arrow keys to navigate between books and among the populated cells.
-- JesusHChrist, Apr 01 2009

I don't get what the spreadsheet is for.
-- Spacecoyote, Apr 01 2009


Isn't the text in open-source thingies like the Gutemberg project already formatted?
-- loonquawl, Apr 01 2009



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