Hybrid book

About hybrid book

Hybrid Book is a multimedia application which enables the user to follow its content simultaneously in the form of text, audio recording and image. It is designed primarily for users with severe visual or hearing impairment. The content of the publication can be viewed either as a text, an audio recording of this text or a video recording of the text translated into sign language. The format of the Hybrid Book allows for multi-level navigation which takes into account the hierarchical structure of the publication.

Project History

The project followed up on a joint project between MTA (the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and CNR (the Italian National Research Council) (DigiBook COP806), which, thanks to the grant support of Italian Centro Nazionalle della Ricerca and the Hungarian KFKI (Paolo Graziani, IROE-SNR, Italy and András Arató, LSTR-KFKI, Hungary) developed the hybrid book project that was introduced at the book fair in Milan in 1999. Drawing on the results of this project and in collaboration with its authors, the Czech research team was set up, consisting of employees of the Support Centre for the Blind and doctoral students from the Laboratory of Searching and Dialogue at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno. The application was developed in 2002 with the support of the Ministry of Education Fund for the Development of Universities.

The original Hybrid Book consisted merely of the combination of text and audio recording; it primarily served the blind students of universities and it was distributed via CDs. Both the application and the structure of the document have been gradually innovated. In 2006 it reached a web form, which has been its manner of distribution ever since. The Hybrid Books Online browser was created along with a database structure maintaining information about the documents and the synchronization of their contents.

Access to the application