Actually the standards for excellent aren't that high. Any time you
consider a percentage as a rating that will be the case. Just think of how
many words are in a book. Now if the accuracy was 99 percent that would
still mean that 1 out of a hundred words could be wrong. Now think of how
fast the average person reads. Let's say 180 words a minute just because
it is an easy number to devide. That would mean that with a book that had
an accuracy of 99 percent you would on average find an error three times a
minute. Ug! Of course some of the so-called inaccuracy would actually be
words that the spell checker just didn't know, but there would also be
words that the spell check would think correct but weren't correct there.
I'm not sure it pays any attention to junk characters and words with
numbers in them. It certainly won't notice punctuation problems. It
certainly can't tell anything about words that are completely missing from
the page and that is extremely obvious and a serious problem to a human
reader.
The ratings do count inaccuracy a little more precisely than I have,
though. If I do my math correctly, which is always doubtful, in a book
with 99.9 percent accuracy you would be finding an error every 3.3 minutes,
which is still farely often. Since that is just an average it doesn't
reflect reality very well. You probably experience the errors by reading
along for a long time then finding some mess that accounts for more than
one error and then go on to read another section of non-mess.
Remember that the ratings are first assigned by the submitter, so the
rating given on the download for validation page for the book probably was
guessed at by the submitter and may or may not have anything to do with
reality. The rating given by the bookshare system is only assigned at the
time of approval by the validator. The value you see when you want to
download a book from the collection is usually going to be determined by
the automated system, but a validator can override the rating chosen by the
system. I would hope the validator's assessment is more accurate than the
system's if they change it.
Now if this message actually makes sense, I've accomplished something
fantastic for a person who hasn't felt good enough to write E-mail or even
try to edit anything I've read lately. And that is dispite the fact that I
can use my computer from anywhere in the living room or kitchen. Actually
the cordless keyboard works in more of the house, but I either can't hear
my synthesizer from the other rooms or wouldn't want to use a computer from
those particular rooms anyway. ;-)
Sarah Van Oosterwijck Assistive Technology Trainer http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity
Gerald, Thanks for the explanation. Maybe I will eventually learn how Bookshare works if I scan long enough. Knowing that I wonder how some books get an excellent rating when they are not. On the other hand, I am reading a book right now that is such an excellent scan that I forget it's not a Web Braille book so we know what the potential to aim for is. Thanks again.
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