Export MS documents as Daisy
Read on Daisy Planet: “DAISY Consortium and Microsoft Collaborate to Develop OpenXML to DAISY XML Converter”. A free downloadable plug-in will allow Microsoft Word users to export Documents to the Daisy XML format (dtbook, NISO Z39.86). This is very good news!
Unfortunately it seems that Maths formulas will not be supported at first. It’s a pity since the MathML-in-Daisy group produced lots of efforts to specify how formulas should be included in a Daisy document. Let’s hope it’s gonna come soon: I heard that it’s already on the developers agenda.
Indeed, this is very good news. My question is: Will speech be implemented when documentation is converted from, let’s say, MSWord to Daisy? What about navigation, can one produce books easily as far as structure is concerned? Thanks for your response. Bachir Benanou, Student.
The exported document is only the XML DTBook file. This format is used by a lot of organisations to store documents for visually impaired people. Documents at this format can be exported to Braille or XHTML or other formats depending on the needs of users (for instance the French Helene server: http://www.serveur-helene.org). There are also software applications which can produce Daisy audio books, with synthetic speech. A lot of software applications and hardware devices using the Daisy format can be found at http://www.daisy.org