Microsoft Grows DAISY for Blind Computer Users While Adobe Wilts
Computerworld (05/09/08) Lai, Eric
Microsoft recently announced the availability of a plug-in that allows Word 2007, 2003, and XP users to easily save documents in the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) XML format, which is the latest version of a standard developed by the nonprofit DAISY Consortium to be the most accessible format for visually impaired computer users. DAISY offers a considerably less frustrating experience for users than screen readers and text-to-speech tools, which miss invisible structural metadata embedded in the document (paragraph marks, table structures, headings, etc.) that represent the most important parts of a Web page because they are key to navigation, browsing, and searching. "From DAISY, you can easily move to other accessible formats, such as Braille or large print, in addition to audio, with little to no extra work," says Sam Ogami with the California State University system's chancellor's office. The DAISY Consortium also aims to help make documents and books accessible to the illiterate, dyslexic, or developmentally disabled, for which the plug-in could also prove helpful. President of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science Curtis Chong has high praise for the plug-in, but points to a gulf between its theoretical and its practical applications. Meanwhile, Jutta Treviranus with the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Center noted in a 2008 paper that she harbors "grave concerns" with the DAISY XML that will be generated from a Word 2007 document because its native document format, Office Open XML (OOXML), breaks basic axioms such as not conflating stylistic metadata with structural metadata. Microsoft's Reed Shaffner says DAISY XML eventually may be ported to versions of OpenOffice.org that support OOXML. The DAISY plug-in is currently being hosted on SourceForge as an open-source project.
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