DAISY

Where has DAISY come from?

DAISY stands for Digital Accessible Information SYstem.

The DAISY Consortium was formed in May 1996, by talking book libraries around the world to lead the transition from analogue to Digital Talking Books (DTBs).

Today, there are 17 Full Members of the DAISY Consortium, more than 55 Associate Members, and more than 20 Friends.

Full and Associate Members are non-profit organisations, typically national talking book libraries or national consortia of such libraries. Friends are for-profit organisations including developers of production and/or playback hardware or software.

The aims for the original DAISY project, back in 1998 were:

• To be able to store more than 20 hours of recorded audio on a single CD
• To give the reader access to the talking book from the table of contents

The DAISY format is going from strength to strength, continually developing and offering more and more functionality and richness of content to people who access the printed word through digital audio.

The vision of the DAISY Consortium

The DAISY Consortium's vision 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.

Why is DAISY a better way to read and publish?

The DAISY format enables the reader flexible access to the digital material via enhanced navigation. So, the same way a sighted reader may skip through the front matter of a book, find chapter headings, find a specific page, jump to certain parts of the text or read from cover to cover - this is all possible within a DAISY DTB.

The beauty of publishing a book in the DAISY format is that all the functionality can be built-in at the beginning by the producer (including full text, images, audio, print page numbers, footnotes etc) and depending on the playback system used, the user can then decide how they access the material. For example, they may only want to listen to the audio; or if they are partially sighted they may want to access the images as well; or if they are dyslexic they may want to listen to the audio and see the synchronised text on screen as well.

DAISY production tools are currently being developed that will enable the production of other accessible formats, such as braille from DAISY source files. Please see our section on the future potential of DAISY for more information about these exciting and fast moving developments.

What are the current DAISY standards in use?

DAISY is a globally recognised technical standard to facilitate the creation of accessible content.

There are two DAISY standards in use:

• DAISY 3
• DAISY 2.02

RNIB currently produces to the DAISY 2.02 standard.

DAISY 4 was officially approved by National Information Standards Organisation (NISO) in August 2008 and is scheduled for completion in 2010.

Related research reports

RNIB has carried out research into the how the transition from analogue to digital audio may affect blind and partially sighted people. The study involved looked into availability of media, transcriber views, and user views. A summary report is also available.

1. Digital transition Media (Word, 367KB)
2. Digital transition Transcribers (Word, 520KB)
3. Digital transition Users (Word, 502KB)
4. Digital transition Summary (Word, 179KB)