DAISY Format Information
Copyrighted books from Bookshare™ are available for download in disability-specific formats: Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) and Grade 1 Braille and Grade 2 Contracted Braille (BRF). DAISY is rapidly becoming the international standard that will enable equal access to information for all people with print disabilities. This page explains more about what it is, how it works, and why it's so great.
DAISY is the digital talking book standard, developed by an international consortium of libraries that serve people who have print disabilities. The DAISY standard was developed in order to enable a person with a print disability to access the information in a book with the same ease with which a sighted person accesses information in a print book. The usability of a DAISY digital book could be compared to that of a cassette tape, the format in which most accessible books were, until relatively recently, available. As audio tapes are fast becoming obsolete, the DAISY format was originally developed for the world of digital talking books delivered on CD, other portable media, or over the Internet.
The DAISY format is a file format standard for digital (electronic) books. In the same way that the HTML files that make up web pages or the ASCII of text format files are based on a standard, DAISY is just that, a standard format.
The goal of the DAISY effort is to take accessible books from the technology of twenty years ago (the audio cassette tape) and fast-forward to the future of digital media such as CDs, DVDs, and the Internet.
Navigation Ability
Books that support all of the navigation of the DAISY format include more capabilities than books on tape, such as:
- Book skimming: Readers "navigate" forward or backward by word, paragraph, page or chapter, so they can easily skim through the book to get a quick sense of its content.
- Going right to pages, chapters, section headers, etc.: When specific information or a reading assignment starts on page 37 or chapter 3, the reader can jump right to that location in the book.
- Support for Table of Contents and an Index: The DAISY standard supports these methods of referencing information in books. For example, if the DAISY book includes an index, a reader can find a referenced word or phrase and jump right to that reference to review it.
- Note-taking capabilities: Readers can take margin notes or mark passages in a book, similar to using a highlighter pen to mark words or sections in a printed book. This functionality is dependent on the software player used to read the book, rather than on the book itself.
Bookshare books, since they originate as scanned books, can currently be navigated by word, paragraph and page. The books can also be searched by word. For example, you could search for each occurrence of the word "revolution." Also, passages can be bookmarked within the software DAISY players provided with Bookshare membership (Victor Reader Soft Bookshare Edition and READ:OutLoud Bookshare Edition). The DAISY standard does not require incorporation of all navigation features; the ability to navigate depends of the navigation features built into the book.
Resources
If you are interested in knowing more about the DAISY standard, please visit the DAISY Consortium's website at www.daisy.org.
For more technical information about DAISY format books, visit the Consortium’s Technology Overview page at www.daisy.org/about_us/dtbooks. asp.
The DAISY Consortium has adopted a NISO standard format, ANSI/NISO Z39.86, as the DAISY standard. Read more about this at www.loc.gov/nls/niso.