Poorly chosen material, inaccessible, poor PDF

This book is a good example of why not everything can be made into an audio book "as is". From chapter 1 you are bombarded with "as you can see in the supplementary material", "as referenced in the image below" etc. If you are listening to audio books for accessibility reasons e.g. visual impairment, then much of the material in this book is inaccessible to you. If you listen as I do while running, it makes for poor user experience as I have to go and look at the PDF when I get home and review the diagrams and visuals, but the PDF is virtually unusable as detailed below. Throughout the book there are also references to other books and authors, with nary a quote from them. At least a few relevant quotes would have been useful rather than just forcing the reader to go find said book. And of course there is no bibliography or list of these books to allow one to easily go look them up afterwards, so if I want to go find those books now, I would literally have to go through the audio book again and find the mentions of them and write them down. There were several options that could have made this more suitable for audio treatment:
- select material which is not dependant on diagrams and images. Maybe there is not much, in which case maybe Gardner's columns aren't suitable for audio book treatment
- when mentioning an image, just as we do in accessibility for the web, don't just say "see image". Describe the image in enough detail that a non-sighted user can at least get an idea of what you're talking about
- make sure the PDF is usable. There is no table of contents, no headings or chapters identified in the PDF, making it virtually impossible to make a connection between the PDF and the audio material unless you essentially have the PDF open as you are listening. The images don't even have figure numbers. It's like they were literally scanned piecemeal out of old Scientific American magazines and thrown together in a PDF with no editing or structure. The PDF literally ends with this "sentence": "Cells corresponding to traditionally"
Also on a minor note I found elements of the narration a little annoying, like her pronunciation of "factorial" as though it had no "i" in it, funny (to me at least) pronunciation of "exponent", saying "A with a line over it, B with a line over it" instead of a shorthand like "A prime, B prime" etc. But this is minor in comparison to the significant accessibility and usability issues noted above. This book should really not be on audible in its current form, it's like they forgot to finish their work, or didn't bother considering why or how people use audio books in the first place.

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