Forum on Library Services for People with Disabilities

The Enhanced Reading Experience Through DAISY Books

William Jolley, Secretary General, DAISY Consortium, for the Forum on Library Services for People with Disabilities, March 2002

The DAISY Standard for Digital Accessible Documents is an open worldwide specification that revolutionises the reading experience for people who are blind or print disabled. It was created and is promulgated by the DAISY Consortium, based on user requirements drawn up by an expert group of the European Blind Union. It is revolutionary. Taking advantage of the power and flexibility of the digital environment, the DAISY Standard is equivalent to progressing from the scroll to the book for sighted people.

The DAISY Consortium is the worldwide collaboration of talking book libraries which has created the DAISY specification. DAISY denotes the Digital Accessible Information System. The Vision of the DAISY Consortium is that all published information is available to people with print disabilities, at the same time and at no greater cost, in an accessible, feature-rich, navigable format. The DAISY Consortium is developing the international standard and implementation strategies for the production, exchange and use of digital talking books in both developed and developing countries, with special attention to mainstream technology to ensure access to information for people with print disabilities.

There is no standard for navigable, accessible, digital documents other than the DAISY Standard. It is the only standard for digital talking books. The Open eBook Forum is expected to adopt the DAISY navigation model for its eBook Publication Structure Guidelines later this year. Any statement that eBooks will make DAISY books obsolete, demonstrates a lack of understanding of the relationship between eBooks and the DAISY standard. EBooks, as specified by the Open eBook Forum, are text-only; they do not include audio. The DAISY Standard is the only open specification for navigable, accessible multimedia documents.

The DAISY Standard:

DAISY books vastly improve the reading experience, by comparison with cassettes, through:

The DAISY Standard allows the producing agency full flexibility in the extent of markup to be used:

The DAISY Standard is very flexible, building on open standards of the Internet. The most feature-rich DAISY books are multimedia documents, full text and full audio; but many DAISY books are audio without text or conversely text without audio. As talking book libraries convert their analogue collections to digital, many of them embracing the DAISY Specification; it is not reasonable to expect these audio books to be supplemented by text, and therefore audio-only DAISY books will be the backbone of library collections in the foreseeable future.

The DAISY Standard allows for flexibility in playback devices and technology.

The DAISY Standard uses file specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for the Internet. This has specific technology-related benefits.

The DAISY Standard has been adopted in many countries, and conversion and production programs are well underway.

The DAISY Standard is an open specification. The DAISY Consortium recognises that the protection of intellectual property is governed by national copyright laws. Therefore the DAISY Standard allows individual organisations to develop their own approaches to the protection of intellectual property.

Australian copyright Law (Section 135Zp) does not seem to require that files are encrypted, although it may be construed as requiring that circulation must be restricted to persons with print disabilities. This seems like good news since it appears to open the way for libraries in Australia to produce DAISY books which may be accessed, although without the full richness of their navigation features, by commercially available MP3 players. For books which are audio-only, it is relatively simple to write and apply a simple post-production tool that would reorder the filenames of the MP3 digital audio files, so that the natural play list of the MP3 player would correspond with the chronological playing order of the files which comprise the book.

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