www.ffzg.hr/infoz/dzs/

Till the advent of new information technologies blind and partially sighted persons were limited to the information produced specially for them: Braille, large print, and talking books. Special material production is very expensive and time-consuming. The Croatian Library for the Blind (the unique institution in our country) has about 5000 titles available on stock. The majority of the titles are fine literature. There are also 279 professional literature titles. (Last recorded 8 May 2001).
The modern technologies give a relatively cheap access to blind and partially sighted users to the Internet and to a wide range of electronic sources. The speech synthesis is the most spread way of using the computer: a digitally syntheses human voice speaks all that comes up on the screen. There are many programers of this type for the most important world languages. One is also being developed for the Croatian language at the Phonetics Department at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb.

According to the database of the Croatian Association for the Blind, in our country live about 5500 blind persons, and 1406 of its members use the services of the library. They read approximately 17 titles a year. The aim of the digital collection is to collect the full texts of the books and magazines in Croatian language as well as other information sources for the use of the blind. The collection is created in the accordance with the recommendations of World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org) that gives a wide range of guidelines for the access to the web for the persons with special needs.

The copyright problem exists because there are no law regulations for the exceptions for small user groups, such as blind users. It is also not obligatory to send a text in a blind-friendly format (e.g. the digital or audio format).)

We have set the following criteria for the stock selection:

1) Croatian language, the publications already existent in the digital format which are copyright free
2) Educational material, independent of the language or copyright

The stock processing involves the following steps:

- digitalization (if a text is not in the digital format)
- conversion to the HTML format
- meta data DC (Dublin Core): author, title, subject, http address etc.

The collected stock is classified according to the specific subjects and epitomized for faster and more affective search of the World Wide Web and of the collection itself.

The project is divided into four phases:

THE FIRST PHASE:

A) The creation of the website in accordance with the W3C guidelines (We should meet high standards in all phases.)
B) The collection and processing (HTML, meta data) of books and magazines which are copyright free in Croatian language (all phases)
C) Inform on existence of the site to various search engines
D) Building in of a search engine for the collection site
E) Collaboration with the Croatian Association for the Blind (all phases)

THE THIRD PHASE:

1) The regulation of the copyright contracts between editors, and the Croatian Copyright Agency
2) The development of the authorization system for the copyright protected units
3) The solution of the problems with server
4) The installation of the software for links verification
5) The adaptation of the existent collection for the educational materials for the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb (www.ffzg.hr/infoz/biblio/nastava/dz/zbirka.htm)

THE THIRD PHASE:

A) Finishing the collection of the prescribed educational material for the Department of Information Sciences
B) The creation of the audio collection of literal texts (by permission of Bulaja editions)
C) Setting up of a form for the requests of the blind users
D) Chat for the blind
E) The organization of the workshop for the use of the collection
F) Evaluation: within the chat room, requests and workshop

THE FOURTH PHASE:

A) The development of the collection - collecting the educational material from other departments at the Faculty of Philosophy
B) Evaluation: online questioners