DAISY Digital Talking Book - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

DAISY is a standard for digital talking books. DAISY books are typically used by people have "print disabilities," including blindness, impaired vision, dyslexia. The DAISY format allows users to hear and navigate written material presented in an audible format.

In a DAISY book, content is presented with enabled navigation within a sequential and hierarchical structure consisting of (marked-up

Markup language

A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...

) text synchronized with audio.

DAISY 2 was a standard based on XHTML

XHTML

XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

and SMIL

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

SMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...

. DAISY 3 is also based on XML and is standardized as ANSI

American National Standards Institute

The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...

/NISO

National Information Standards Organization

The National Information Standards Organization is a United States non-profit standards organization that develops, maintains and publishes technical standards related to publishing, bibliographic and library applications. It was founded in 1939, incorporated as a not-for-profit education...

Z39.86-2005.

DAISY assists people who, for different reasons, have problems using regular printed media. DAISY books have the benefits of regular audiobooks, but they are superior because DAISY 2.02 provides up to six embedded "navigation levels" for content (i.e. other objects such as images, graphics, MathML

MathML

Mathematical Markup Language is an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. It aims at integrating mathematical formulae into World Wide Web pages and other documents...

etcetera) and for displaying synchronized text to speech. DAISY Multimedia can be a talking book, computerised text or a synchronised presentation of text and audio.

As a result, DAISY books allow the blind

Blindness

Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...

listener to navigate an encyclopedia

Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....

; this is impossible using conventional audio recordings because they lack search and navigation features and they require linear listening. While reading a DAISY book, a reader can go to the next or previous page, chapter or sentence.

The DAISY Consortium has been selected by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) as the official maintenance agency for the DAISY/NISO Standard, officially, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86, Specifications for the Digital Talking Book, known as DAISY 3.

The DAISY Consortium was founded in 1996 and consists of a growing membership of organizations around the world committed to developing equitable access to information for people who have a print disability.

Specification

A DTB is a collection of electronic files arranged to present information to the target population via alternative media, namely, human or synthetic speech, refreshable Braille, or visual display, e.g., large print.
The files comprising the Daisy formats are:

Package File: Drawn from the Open eBook Publication Structure 1.2. It is a XML1.0 file with a set of metadata describing the DTB, a list of files that make up the DTB (the manifest) and a spine that defines the default reading order of the document. Standard: OEBF * Publication Structure 1.2 (the file extension is “.opf”).
Textual content file: this document contains the text of the document as an XML1.0 according to a specific DTD (dtbook.dtd).
Audio Files: human or synthetic speech recordings.
Image files: for visual displays
Synchronization files: To synchronize the different media files of a DTB during playback, this standard specifies the use of the SMIL2.0.
Navigation control file: use the NCX (Navigation Control File for XML applications) to view the document’s hierarchical structure, allowing user to move through the book’s larger division or progressively smaller steps (footnotes, for example).
Bookmark/Highlight file: support to user-set highlights to which text and audio notes can be applied.
Resource file:
Distribution Information File: describes how to map each SMIL file to a specific media unit.

Distribution and playback

DAISY books can be heard on standalone DAISY players, computers using DAISY playback software, mobile phones, and MP3 players (with limited navigation). DAISY books can be distributed on a CD/DVD, memory card or through the Internet.

A computerized text DAISY book can be read using refreshable Braille display or screen-reading software, printed as Braille book on paper, converted to a talking book using synthesised voice or a human narration, and also printed on paper as large print book. In addition, it can be read as large print text on computer screen.

Software players

Software-based players include, in alphabetical order:

AMIS - Adaptive Multimedia Information System: an open-source self-voicing player for Windows that works with several screen readers; available in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese and a few other languages; developed by the DAISY Consortium
Android Daisy ePub Reader: an opensource project for the Android platform. Currently supports DAISY 2.02 books, translated into several European languages.
AnyDaisy Firefox Extension, by Benetech
ButtercupReader: a web-based application for DAISY 3 books; requires Microsoft Silverlight
CUCAT Olearia, an open-source DAISY reader for Mac OS X
DAISY Book Reader, open-source player for the GNOME desktop (GTK)
Daisy Delight: open-source player for DAISY 2.02, for Mac OS X and Unix-based systems
DAISYPlayer: free player for Microsoft Windows; only available in Spanish
Daisy Player, an OSS/GPL CLI Linux/Ubuntu Daisy Talking Book reader application
DaisyWorm: player for DAISY 2.02, 2002 and 2005, for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad; iOS 4 or higher)
Dolphin EasyReader and EasyReader Express, commercial e-book reader with support for DAISY, unprotected ePub and other formats, for Microsoft Windows
Dorina DAISY Reader (DDReader): a Firefox add-on for DAISY 3.0, available in English, Spanish and Portuguese
emerson-reader, an open-source and cross-platform Epub and DAISY player
FSReaderDAISY Player Software for PAC Mate and Desktop; supports DAISY 2 and DAISY 3
GoDaisy: online DAISY player, in Swedish
Mobile DAISY Player, a commercial player for Symbian
Symbian
Symbian is a mobile operating system and computing platform designed for smartphones and currently maintained by Accenture. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60; unlike Symbian OS, which needed an additional user interface system, Symbian includes a user...

phones
MAX the DAISY Player, a free player for Microsoft Windows products.
ReadHear (commercial; for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows)
Read:OutLoud 6 (commercial; for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows)
Read:OutLoud Bookshare Edition (free for Bookshare members; for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows)
Darwin Reader for Android reads DAISY 2.02 and 3.0 text and audio books

Other relevant software includes:

Daisy Uppsala Archive Project, server-side system for managing DAISY (Digital Talking Books) files
Online Daisy Delivery Technology, open-source software to deliver DAISY books online

Hardware players

There are also a wide range of hardware products available that can play DAISY content, usually in a portable form factor. Some of these devices are dedicated to playback of books, while others focus on other functionality, such as PDA or mobile Internet access, and offer DAISY playback as either a feature of the unit or as a software add-on.

A short (incomplete) list of products that have built-in support for DAISY playback includes:

Victor Reader Stream, a hand-held portable DAISY player for the blind, visually handicapped and print impaired, produced by HumanWare
Victor Reader Wave, also by HumanWare, is a portable CD player that can play DAISY content from CD media
BookSense, a similar, smaller unit produced by GW Micro; the advanced XT model features built-in flash memory and Bluetooth headset support for playback, as well as an FM radio
The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) in the United States has developed a proprietary DAISY player designed for use by its print-disabled patrons. The player will replace the aging cassette-based distribution system.

Access to materials by the disabled

Since DAISY is often used by people with disabilities, many of the existing organizations which produce accessible versions of copyrighted content are moving to the DAISY standard, and slowly moving away from more traditional methods of distribution such as cassette tape.

In the United States, Learning Ally (Formally "Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic" or RFB&D) Bookshare

Bookshare

Bookshare is an online accessible digital library for print disabled readers. In 2007, it received an award of $32 million from the US Government's Office of Special Education Programs to make the service available for free to all print disabled students in the US...

and the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped is a free library program of braille and audio materials circulated to eligible borrowers in the United States by postage-free mail. The program is a service sponsored by the Library of Congress. People may be eligible for the...

(NLS), among others, are offering content to blind and visually impaired individuals. Learning Ally also allows access by those with dyslexia

Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...

or other disabilities which impair the person's ability to read print. The NLS uses a library methodology, on the basis that the books are loaned (as they traditionally have been, on physical cassette), hence they are able to offer content free of charge, just as any public library can. Learning Ally and Bookshare both are subscription-based services.

Content from both the NLS and the Learning Ally organizations utilizes the DAISY Protected Digital Book (PDTB) encryption standard. The basic structure of the DAISY definition files remains the same, however, the audio itself, and in some cases certain information tags in the DAISY SMIL

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

files, are encrypted and must be decrypted in order to be read/played back. This is done to comply with law 17 U.S.C. § 121 requiring copyrighted material to be distributed in a specialized format to prevent unauthorized individuals, such as those who do not have a qualifying disability, from accessing the materials. The organization which offers the content provides a decryption key to the user, which can be installed into a DAISY player to allow decryption. As the encryption schemes are not part of the core DAISY standard, only players which specifically implement the necessary algorithms and key management will be able to access these titles. Bookshare does not use such encryption; the data as downloaded from the server is encrypted using only the user's password, which is used to decrypt the data to an open format, and thus content from Bookshare generally is readable on any compliant DAISY player.

Production

Add-ins or extensions to create DAISY files from office software are also available:

Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

and Sonata Software created a Save as DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

to convert Office Open XML text documents to DAISY XML.
Odt2DAISY is an extension for OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

that exports OpenDocument Text to DAISY XML or to Full DAISY (both XML and audio).

Other tools for DAISY production include:

the DAISY Pipeline, a cross-platform "open source framework for document- and DTB-related pipelined transformations", developed by the DAISY Consortium ,
the DAISY Pipeline GUI ,
PipeOnline, a web interface for the DAISY Pipeline ,
Daisy Producer, an integrated production management system for Digital Talking Books based on the DAISY Pipeline and liblouis
Z39.86 DTB Validator, "Zedval": "a Java-based conformance validator for ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Digital Talking Books"
Dolphin Publisher and Dolphin EasyProducer (commercial products)
Obi, a free and open-source authoring tool by the DAISY Consortium
Tobi, a free and open-source authoring tool by the DAISY Consortium
Book Wizard Producer by the American Printing House for the Blind
American Printing House for the Blind
The American Printing House for the Blind is an American non-for-profit corporation in Louisville, Kentucky promoting independent living for people who are blind and visually impaired. For over 150 years APH has created unique products and services to support all aspects of daily life without...

.
MAX the DAISY Maker powered by Drager and Lienert. Produces DAISY documents from Word Documents, PDF, HTML, CHM (Help files), TEXT and hash encoded TEXT. Will synchronize text to human narration. Multi-language. Will use SAPI5 voices. Available in North American through U-R-Able (www.u-r-able.com) .

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.