[nabs] blind catholics, a project

[Laura Glowacki]

Josh,

Are you a student?  If so, access to both rfb&d and bookshare is 
free.  Also, membership to NLS is also free regardless of student 
status.

Have you checked the Gutenburg project?  I know they are a good 
source for public domain etexts.

Laura
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Josh Kennedy" <jkenn337 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs at acb.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 4:26 PM
Subject: [nabs] blind catholics, a project


Hi

Well I looked and looked and there are no blind catholic 
organizations
in the United States. I found the association of blind catholics, 
but
its in the United Kingdom and I surely cannot go there for 
meetings, at
least not at this point.

I am also disappointed to report that after extensive searching 
the only
catholic materials I can get in daisy format either daisy text or 
daisy
audio is on bookshare nls and rfbd. But you have to be a member 
to join
those. There are many public domain documents on the ewtn website 
which
are just text or word documents. I don't think EWTN thought of 
blind
people when they designed their site and their library. Here is 
what
would be really cool.
1. there are public domain catholic bibles and catholic 
catechisms. the
baltimore catechism 1901 and douay rheims bible are public domain
materials. they may be older but they're certainly readable. But 
they
are not in daisy format! It would be nice to have a blind 
catholics
devision which would combine both ACB and nfb blind people who 
are
catholics, interested in catholicism or whoever wants to join for
curiosity sake. I haven't created a website in years though. I 
guess I
could use ms-word to help me with that. And maybe we could have 
online
bible study or catechism classes for people. I wonder if anybody 
in my
parish would want to help or could help out with this? I think 
maybe
I'll ask next time. I'm the only blind person in my parish. My 
wife
doesn't go with me but I hope someday she will decide to. I do 
take my
sighted son to church with me though.

Oh, for those who don't have word. if you want to use openoffice 
to make
daisy books you can use vinux in a virtual machine it has 
openoffice
writer its accessible in vinux right out of the box. just add the 
daisy
plugin and off you go making daisy books. and you can copy and 
paste
your books to and from windows and vinux with vmware tools just 
using
copy and paste commands. I have word in windows. But converting 
ewtn
library documents to daisy will be a big project. First I have to 
get
familiar with how save as daisy works. Also for daisy audio 
microsoft
anna or the acapela voices would be good for converting to daisy 
audio I
think. So what do you guys think? There have to be more blind 
people who
are catholic out there besides just me, perhaps my wife in the 
future
well so far she's not catholic...

Josh
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