Blog Relations

I’m sitting in cafe or British Library, working on coding up Sophie’s fab new design for Storynory. I was just interrupted by a Skype user I did not know. I was a bit suspicious at first, but then delighted to find that I was chatting to a Storynory listener – born in 1997, Korean, living in Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, the son (or daughter, not sure) of a Korean teacher in a school, and blind.

He or she was using a screen reader, which reads text off the screen. Obviously audio stories appeal to blind users, but they also need to be able to find their way around the text and links of the site. And that means designing with basic accessibility in mind – like not putting text into images, or at least using a good image replacement technique like Gilder / Livin. Currently our header has no text behind it, but I’m going to fix that in the new Storynory design.

Anyway I’m pleased to say that the user said that it was easy to find the way around our site.

One thing you are supposed to do is to put navigation sidebars below the main text in the markup. The idea is that the user doesn’t listen to the screen reader repeating the links again and again. I’m wondering about this. Surely it’s important to be able to find the navigation quickly…. ? Just thinking about this.

It was a happy coincidence. Last weekend our kids’ podcast, Storynory, published an audio-story from Korea called “The Blind Man’s Daughter”. Unkown to us, Storynory was at the same time written up in Chosen, one of Korea’s leading daily newspapers. The article mentions several English story websites for children, and I’m told that that the author remarks on our narrator’s English accent ( Natasha’s accent is Welsh, strictly speaking) – and says that he’s embarrassed on behalf of Korea’s children who only know English spoken with an American accent.

Our audio stories are already popular in Korea. We syndicate them to a site run by Koid, Korea’s Telephone directory. It’s called Speak 114.

A while ago I was contacted by Noorjahan from Afghanistan.  He asked me for permission to translate and publish Storynory’s version of the Golden Goose in the Dari language.   Although it is by the Brothers Grimm, this was a very free adaptation in my own words.   I gladly sent him a free license to use it.  His publication is for use in schools, and is financed by GTZ.

I’m really glad to say that Noorjahan has been in touch to say that his book will be published in January.   It will be distributed in 700 schools 22 Afghan provinces.  It’s the sort of outcome that I would never have thought of when we began Storynory.

Hugh at Newcastle U

I was a guest of Dr. Pauline Dixon of the E.G West Centre in Newcastle University. The center looks into the role of private education – particularly in developing countries. In the world of trendy-left academia, it’s pretty controversial stuff, but I found it quite inspiring.

For instance, they’ve identified 900 private schools in Hyderabad. Most of them are catering for the very poor – but even so the fees represent about 6% of the parents’ income. And in return the children receive motivated and enthusiastic teaching.

I’m very proud to say that Storynory is being used in some of those Indian schools to help with English.

Pauline asked me to do a presentation on Storynory to some of her graduate students taking her Education and Entrepreneurship module. The students come from all over the world, and hold every sort of view. Of course I was delighted. But before I even got going with my bit, the class discussion touched on whether a business person running a school in a slum of a developing country would be interested in anything else other than profit. I felt I had to speak up

If you are going to dedicate your life to a business – you aren’t just doing it for the money – you have to a vision. Yes, money is important – but so is creating something of value for the world. There may be some business people who are just perusing wealth – but most of us want to create something of worth.

I did my presentation – and the voice of our narrator – Natasha – filled the room with our atmospheric Baba Yaga story – and the advertisement for AudibleKids to show how we pay for Storynory’s development.

I also played this YouTube video from a five year old Storynory listener in Chicago:

Which I think says it all about the closeness with our audience.

Richard Graham

I was followed by an extrovert presentation by Richard Graham of Genki English. For the past 8 years he has been developing lively course of English teaching based on songs – and he’s selling the CD’s and teaching plans online. To show how it works, Richard had the whole graduate class jumping up and down and singing LEFT RIGHT FORWARD BACK.

Genki English has sold all over the world – Richard’s just back from Cambodia where it is now in every Government school. He’s a true online entrepreneur – and somebody who has shown that you can bypass traditional distribution routes and get your product out there – but you do have to know your market. He began by teaching English in Japan – and I think that’s why he understood the market opportunity for his teaching method that won’t have any bored kids.