Lis mon Livre
The voice reader for the elderly
Last update: August 2026.
Thanks to AI technologies built into smart speakers, visually impaired and dyslexic people, and especially elderly people, are now able to access a media library of 70,000 audiobooks without having to manipulate a keyboard or screen, or having to request a CD from specialized libraries. This service is available in France and Canada, thanks to our partnership with Association Valentin Haüy (AVH, with its Éole library, France) and Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA, Canada).
The project was originally developed for the Google Home platform, and the service improved step by step with CELA testers and AVH; by early June 2022, we could give a full demonstration (in English) at the Digital Publishing Summit 2022. But Google suddenly announced that it was abandoning the technology our development was based on, without offering any alternative. “Patatras”; a huge disappointment for the teams.
Fortunately, in early 2022, we had started porting the solution to the Amazon Alexa platform to support users of this device. From then on, the team focused on creating an Alexa skill. This work took time, and we made many iterations through our team’s interactions with the CELA and AVH teams, as well as Amazon’s enthusiastic Alexa team.
Our friends at CELA talked about it at the Digital Publishing Summit 2023. Since then, we finalized development after multiple rounds of refinements to the user experience and architectural enhancements.
The service architecture is interesting, since setting up this service necessitates a technical partnership between EDRLab and the specialized library: a library that stores its audiobooks in Daisy format must provide protected access to its media content (we do not duplicate the content). It must also provide an OPDS feed for its catalog – with a search feature – and implement the OPDS authentication API to let users access the audiobooks they have reserved. We then plug our Alexa middleware into their OPDS service, and create a white-label Alexa skill for the library. Developing an OPDS service for an audiobook catalog is a great way to open it to many access methods, especially web and mobile applications.
The service is now fully available for all AVH and CELA users, in French and English. If you have an Alexa speaker and a CELA account in Canada, or an Éole account in France, you can simply say “Alexa, ouvre Valentin Lecture” or “Alexa, open Accessible Reading Canada”. You’ll need to follow the instructions for associating your account with Alexa. For that, someone needs to manipulate the Alexa application on a smartphone (a smartphone-savvy relative may be helpful). Then you’ll have immediate access to a huge library of audiobooks at the sound of your voice. The voice assistant’s online help will then allow you to navigate with ease.
It would be easy for the EDRLab team to create new instances of this great service for other specialized libraries, at a cost that corresponds to our non-profit status. We hope associations for the blind, in Europe or elsewhere, will be interested in offering such a service to their members.
Readium LCP
The vendor-neutral and interoperableDigital Rights Management technology, embeddable in any reading application based on the Readium SDK.
contact@edrlab.org
+33 1 83 64 41 34
