Week 3: Character Dialogue

We've been making books and we would like to hear how accessible they are from your perspective, and what we can do differently to make them better.
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Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
Rachel_Osolen
»
Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:35 pm
In written plays the dialogue is presented on the page generally with the Characters Name before the dialogue, and often separated by a colon. An example would be;

Character A: Why hello! Nice to see you on a day like today.

In e-text we tend to stick to this format.

Indian Arm is an example of this format. Here is a link to the catalogue: https://nnels.ca/repository-search?sear ... Indian+Arm

Another way this has been done is the character name is in all capital letters and in Strong Style

CHARACTER A: Why hello! Nice to see you on a day like today.

The Rez Sisters is an example of this format. Here is a link to the catalogue: https://nnels.ca/items/rez-sisters-play-two-acts

As mentioned in the post about Stage Direction, there are examples in our catalogue of plays that use multiple voices in either an audio recording of the play being read, or in a DAISY audio only, or DAISY audio+text (synthetic or real voices.) The voice that reads the Stage Direction would also read the characters name, and then another automated voice, or actor, would then read the dialogue.

The Tempest is one example with multiple voices in a DAISY format with multiple vocies:
https://nnels.ca/items/tempest


Questions:

Which style of dialogue do you prefer? Why?
Do you have any suggestions on how to improve dialogue?
What format, or file type, do you think works best for written plays overall?


BONUS QUESTION: If you have time to compare and contrast both The Rez Sisters with Indian Arm, could you share with us what about the navigation and formatting of the two written plays worked, and what did not work?
As Always,

Rachel
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
Karoline
»
Thu Mar 15, 2018 11:00 am
I have now read Indian Arm and The Res Sisters.
I prefer more information, therefore, I liked the formatting of Indian Arm better then The Res Sisters.
I think if my JAWS settings were not as they are, I may have missed the bolded information. Right now I have a scheme that tells me about the type of font that is on the page. I normally do not have this on.

I think the different voices in the Audio formats probably helps.
I will download that Audio play, and see what that would be like.
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
Rachel_Osolen
»
Thu Mar 15, 2018 11:32 am
Thanks for the feedback. That is really helpful.

Let us know if you do get a chance to listen to the Audio play.
As Always,

Rachel
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
ryano
»
Sun Mar 18, 2018 1:30 pm
I checked the format and compared as I used zoomtext.

I like the one with Indian Arm because they are easy to edit and change the format on my laptop and no line like Rex.

My suggest are set up word in bold to make easy to catch who is talking. I like the bold in rex, but prefer same format as indian arm. For character bold on who is talking such

PHILOMENA: :Oh, go on.
[Page 3]
PELAJIA: I'm tired, Philomena, tired of this place. There's days I wanna leave so bad.

Maybe will be better.
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
Rachel_Osolen
»
Sun Mar 18, 2018 1:47 pm
Thanks for the feedback Ryan!
As Always,

Rachel
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
rmarion
»
Tue Mar 20, 2018 12:30 pm
Hopefully this isn’t too late. I have a couple of comments on this topic.

I think either format will work fine. However, putting the characters names in Bold with a strong emphasis style would help for reading the screen. Since there are potentially different styles, I would suggest inserting a producer’s note into the file explaining the formatting. Therefore, if a person is using a screen reader to read the file they would know what settings they may have to turn on to obtain the full benefit of the text formatting if necessary.

As far as the file type, I would try to have only one file if the play is in EText. This would make it easier to manage on a book playing machine if they need to. Because the file is a zip file it had to be unpacked before importing it into a daisy playback software package and I would think this would be the case with daisy machines like victor or plextalk.

Finally, I did quickly listen to the beginning of the audio play with the multiple readers. It seemed to work overall. I did find the different qualities of the audio recordings a bit distracting but it is definitely manageable.
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Re: Week 3: Character Dialogue

Post by
ka.li
»
Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:57 am
I listened to the play with multiple recorded readers as well and the format works well but I also found the quality of the audio to be distracting. No one was normalized so every reader's part was in the same volume and the quality of each recording was varied.

As for the character names in bold and Cps, or just the character name without styling, I like the latter because when reading in braille, the braille indicators for bold and caps take up precious space on a braille display. Character names mostly like won't be skimmed over and even listening to it in speech and turning on functionality that would change the pitch of the screen reader when encountering bold doesn't really add much to the auditory experience.
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