Microsoft has announced a new free Save as Daisy XML add-in for Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, to support the Daisy standard for creating texts for blind and partially-sighted users.
Daisy stands for Digital Accessible Information SYstem. It lets you: produce a structured Digital Talking Book; synchronize an electronic text file with an audio file; generate an electronic braille version; and create a digital text that can be read using a Daisy player with a braille display or speech synthesizer. A Daisy player could be a PC or, if you have a recorded text, a suitable portable CD player. (Anybody who needs something useful to do could work on the shockingly inadequate Wikipedia page.)
Books in the RNIB's Talking Book Service library are in Daisy format.
Microsoft also provides free Daisy Pipeline software, which converts a Daisy XML file to the Digital Talking Book (DTB) format.
The Daisy XML converter is open source, and available from http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy/ (Well, the code is at SourceForge.)
One of the key reasons for moving from closed binary Microsoft Office formats to XML formats is that it makes this kind of machine reprocessing far easier....
A Daisy Player from techready.co.uk
