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:
- Contains elements which revolutionise the reading experience;
- Allows flexibility for the producer in the extent of structuring to be applied, functionality to be achieved, and the mix of audio and textual content to be provided;
- Allows flexibility in the choice of hardware or software player, and in the distribution medium which may be used;
- Builds on the file formats and architectures of the Internet, allowing full advantage to be taken of mainstream technology developments;
- Benefits reader populations which go far beyond blind people to include people with the full range of print disabilities, students with learning disabilities, students of English as a second language, and the general public wishing to listen to audio books;
- Has been adopted in many countries around the world; and
- Is gaining mainstream acceptance and support.
DAISY books vastly improve the reading experience, by comparison with cassettes, through:
- Easier media handling (forty hours on one CD);
- Improved audio quality;
- Navigation capability through the book by page, chapter and section;
- Ability to use the contents and index with speed and efficiency;
- Ability to set and recall place marks; and
- Ability to start reading from current place, even when player has been switched off and disk has been removed.
The DAISY Standard allows the producing agency full flexibility in the extent of markup to be used:
- DAISY books are no more difficult to produce than analogue books; indeed, with the adoption of the DAISY Standard many tools are being developed to streamline production processes.
- Many analogue recordings do not contain page numbers, so it is not necessary to insert page numbers when converting them to a DAISY book.
- Many novels are printed for sighted people with division into chapters and paragraphs, and with page numbers; and it is not difficult to incorporate this navigational information into a DAISY book when it is being recorded.
- Many library books (gardening books, recipes and religious texts) are much easier to use if they have some structural information included.
- Many textbooks have an index and appendices which consist of very long lists. An option under the DAISY standard is for this material to be rendered in synthetic speech, allowing for volunteer narrators to concentrate on the main body of text.
- The scheme used for eText books in Australia (based on the ICADD-22 tag set) for use by blind people is non-standard, and the DAISY Standard provides a system which is easy to apply and use.
- The DAISY Standard enables adoption of a single-source model for production of books in accessible formats: Braille (hardcopy and paperless), eText (for synthetic speech rendering) or large print.
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.
- Two companies, VisuAide in Canada and Plextor in Japan, have developed hardware DAISY players. Their cost, at $900 each, is comparable with four-track talking book players when they were introduced twenty years ago.
- These players may be viewed as sophisticated CD-based MP3 players. They have extra software and keys on them which allow the user to exploit the features of the DAISY Standard to enrich the reading experience.
- CD is the currently preferred distribution medium for DAISY books. A CD can hold forty hours of speech using MP3 compression. Compare a 24-hour book in different formats:
- 1 DAISY CD;
- 18 music audio CDs;
- 16 two-track cassettes; or
- 4 four-track cassettes.
- Other technologies may emerge for holding DAISY books, such as memory sticks which are now to be found in digital cameras and some MP3 players.
- Software players are programs which run on desktop or notebook computers. These are well suited to DAISY books which are text and audio. However, they may lack the portability of stand-alone hardware players. It is likely that later this year software players will become available at no charge to the end-user
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 can evolve, as new technology enables new information access and delivery opportunities.
- Software is being developed that will allow Internet streaming of DAISY books, so that the user can take full advantage of the DAISY navigation features.
- Telecommunication and radio solutions may be developed for the transmission of DAISY books, overcoming the need for postal delivery.
- Satellite distribution of DAISY books is technically feasible, and ideally suited for services to people in rural and remote parts of Australia.
The DAISY Standard has been adopted in many countries, and conversion and production programs are well underway.
- In Japan 10,000 books have been converted from Analogue to DAISY format. There are 500 local centres throughout Japan now producing DAISY books.
- Since November 2000 all production for the Swedish Library of Talking books and Braille has been digital, in the DAISY format. This is about 2500 books per year. Also, in Sweden, books for students with print disabilities are distributed on CD only, with no more cassette distribution.
- The Royal National Institute for the Blind (UK) is launching its DAISY book service in April 2002.
- The RNIB DAISY collection will begin with 2500 books, expanding at the rate of 500 books per month.
- Most of these books will have been converted from the analogue collection, but about 10% of the digital stock will be new titles.
- RNIB plans a three-year transition period for its 48,000 customers from its analogue to digital talking book service.
- From June 2002 RNIB will offer the digital talking book service to all new customers, and will start the conversion program for existing customers at a rate of 1000 a month.
- RNIB customers pay a library subscription fee which covers access to the talking books and the loan of the player. RNIB plans to offer customers of its digital talking book service a choice to purchase a DAISY player and/or to use a software player. In either case, since RNIB is no longer providing a hardware player to the customer, the library subscription fee will be reduced.
- RNIB has adopted an elementary approach to structuring in the first books from its analogue collection which it is converting to the DAISY format, splitting each title into segments of fifteen minutes duration. RNIB has taken this decision consciously as a starting point, in order to get a stock of DAISY books introduced as quickly as possible; but the granularity of structuring will be regularly reviewed and can be expected to become much finer as expertise is developed and an a routine is established in DAISY book production.
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.
