DaisyAn accessibility add-in for MS Word not only lets you save as audio, but has interesting serendipitous possibilities
As an inveterate lover of audiobooks, i know that they can be just as much a pleasure as their print counterparts. Audiobooks fit neatly into my life to stop me from getting bored in my car, give me company when I’m doing mundane tasks around the house, calm my nerves while I wait at the dentist’s, or to read to me when I want to give my eyes a rest. Okay, I made up the one about the dentist. I refuse to go to the dentist. But the rest is true.
For people with print disabilities, text-to-speech is a godsend. But every bit of information one encounters isn’t available in a navigable audio format. And that’s what the Daisy (digital accessible information system) consortium has been working on for decades. Its vision is a world where people with print challenges have equal access to information without delay or additional expense.Accessibility Daisy has members in almost all countries using its digital standards to translate data to digital audio. The challenge has been to translate to audio fast and prolifically enough. There has been virtually no choice in digital for those who need them. That’s where Open XML comes to the rescue. The Daisy consortium decided to make its technology and standards open so that anyone interested could develop it further. Microsoft, with a long-time interest in accessibility, stepped in. Collaborating with Daisy and others, they created an add-in for Word that lets anyone make a digital-talking file. And it’s as easy as saving a file; you opt to ‘Save As Daisy ’. With the most recent version announced for Word 2010, you get an entire menu and ribbon for it as well.
It takes no special expertise to create the digital audio file. You will need to be neat with how you create it — use the style options to make proper headings, footnotes, or whatever else you need. Put in captions for pictures and make sure there is no mixed and confusing formatting. That’s all. The remarkable thing then is that xml allows the document to be audio-navigable. It lets you know where you are in the file, even highlighting it in yellow, bookmarking your access and taking into account all headings and subheads. In a player, you can use buttons to really move across the document. This feature differentiates it from a regular, recorded, read-out audio file. Navigation is impressive and can be by sentence, page number, title, para, time increments and, in some devices, even by words. The hardware is available from agencies that provide Daisy books (see www.daisy.org) and the software is free to download. Daisy books can also be used on mp3 players and phones.
Of course, an electronic-sounding voice reads the audio. But, amazingly, listeners get used to this rapidly and even speed up the voice on players to consume content faster.
Although assistive technology benefits the target community, there are often great advantages for just anyone. With the barrier to the creation of talking books and files removed, there should be no reason why the quantity of information that is accessible in many different situations shouldn’t go up exponentially. The free Daisy add-in for Word and several other wizards lets anyone create audio files, in various languages including Hindi. This is exciting because it has huge potential uses for education and for spreading literacy.
In the US, it’s mandatory for textbooks to be available in the Daisy format. Requests for books can also be made if they are found unsupported. Copyright laws are dropped, reducing the barrier for generating text-to-speech even further. In India, copyright issues have not been resolved and we produce 0.75 per cent of books in Daisy formats. Voluntary agencies convert books where the government needs either to ensure availability or break the barriers to allowing anyone to produce educational books.
All the same, the Daisy Forum of India has 82 organisations involved in production and distribution of Daisy books. Several initiatives such as the production of all NCERT books in Daisy have been taken up. The HRD ministry is running a pilot project to produce university-level books in Daisy format in six languages.
You can use audio accessibility at work as well. Converting files using Daisy can, for example, allow a firm to work with people who have print disabilities. The format can be used as training material, to read out long reports or just as a different way of taking in information. As a writer, I might like to Daisy an article to see how it flows. A related add-in from Microsoft, STAMP, for PowerPoint lets you put in audio and text subtitles for video, captions — again, in multiple languages. These add-ins are available from version 2003 and Windows XP upward. Check them out at Microsoft.com/enable and fit them into your own business needs.
(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-05-2011)
