By Chris Capossela

Introducing DAISY, a technology that promises to revolutionize the reading experience for people who have print disabilities like blindness or dyslexia.

Applies to
Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2003

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My name is Chris Capossela and I am the Senior Vice President of Product Management for the Microsoft Office System. One thing that we have always been passionately committed to at Microsoft is providing a best-in-class experience for users with disabilities. Our mission of helping our customers realize their full potential certainly spans all aspects of our products, but nowhere is this more crucial than in creating the world’s most accessible software. We are always looking for ways to make our products more accessible. To that end we announced last year that we would be kicking off a project in conjunction with the DAISY Consortium and one of our partners, Sonata Software.

Last month we completed an add-in for Word to convert documents to a format that is well-suited to the needs of users with disabilities. Known as DAISY, the format is commonly referred to as the “Digital Talking Book.” The Word to DAISY translator allows users on Word XP, 2007 and 2003 who are working with Open XML to easily convert Word documents to the talking book format. This add-in for Word uses standardized technologies to greatly increase a user’s ability to share information with others.

What is a DAISY book, anyway?

It’s a safe bet that a lot of people who read this column are familiar with DAISY, but for those who aren’t, here's a brief overview. DAISY, or the Digital Accessible Information SYstem, was formed in May, 1996 by talking book libraries to lead the worldwide transition from analog to Digital Talking Books. The Consortium has hundreds of members, friends, and affiliates around the world. From a technology perspective, they produce and maintain a number of powerful technologies that are of tremendous benefit to the accessibility community. So, this begs the question, what is a DAISY book? Well the Consortium describes it as:

• One or more digital audio files containing a human narration of part or all of the source text
• A marked-up file containing some or all of the text (strictly speaking, this marked-up text file is optional)

• A synchronization file to relate markings in the text file with time points in the audio file

• A navigation control file which enables the user to move smoothly between files while synchronization between text and audio is maintained

In short, the DAISY standard can be converted to a number of outputs including Braille, audio, and text synchronized with audio.

Three goals of interoperability

With the introduction of Open XML as the default format in Word 2007, we introduced the potential to do some really cool things with DAISY and further our commitment to interoperability. When we kicked this effort we had three goals in mind.

Our first goal was to reduce the barrier to creating DAISY XML and increase content availability. Prior to this translator, creating a basic DAISY XML file could be very difficult or costly. We wanted to put this capability in the hands the hundreds of millions of Word users around the world and make it as easy as creating any other document.

We also wanted to provide an additional reference implementation for Developers who want to harness the power of Open XML. This is a really important one to us. We are deeply committed to interoperability and are doing everything possible to prove it. It is an open source project and anyone in the developer community is more than free to use it as a reference or even extend it in to other products and on to other platforms (such as Linux).

Finally, we wanted to increase the visibility of DAISY and the benefit it can offer to a variety of users. The DAISY consortium and the digital talking book format are important activity hubs for users with disabilities around the world. When we talk about accessibility we tend to quickly gravitate to the extremes, such as blindness or paralysis. True enough, we have the most to learn from a technology perspective in these areas. However, we tend to forget that technologies like DAISY can help the hundreds of millions of people around the world with other disabilities such as dyslexia, illiteracy, or even things like vision loss brought on by aging.

The future... and beyond

Now that we have made the translator available, I am also happy to say that we are not stopping our work with DAISY and Sonata. We have already started scoping the second phase of our project. Without revealing too much, I think we will have some pretty exciting functionality coming out in a relatively short amount of time.

I want to leave you with a video that really sums up what people can gain from this sort of technology. You can view it here.

About the author

Chris Capossela has spent more than 15 years at Microsoft in a variety positions, and currently manages the Microsoft Office System of products. He first became interested in computers when, as a boy, he wrote a reservation system for his family's small Italian restaurant in Boston on an early IBM PC.

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