odt2daisy is an open-source add-on for OpenOffice.org that converts text processing files to digital talking books in the DAISY1 format (ANSI/NISO2 Z39.86). Digital talking books make print material accessible to blind or otherwise print-disabled persons. DAISY contains features that allow users to navigate by headings or page numbers, and to have a text version that is synchronised with the audio version. odt2daisy produces both Full DAISY 3 (text synchronised with audio) and DAISY 3 XML3 (text without audio). For compatibility with older DAISY software, it also supports DAISY 2.02. odt2daisy also supports mathematical content (Mathematical Markup Language). odt2daisy works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. For the production of audio, odt2daisy relies on the DAISY Pipeline Lite, an open-source software developed by the DAISY Consortium, the LAME MP3 encoding technology, and the operating system’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine(s). The supported languages depend on the TTS engines available on the user’s system. On Unix-based systems odt2daisy relies on the open-source eSpeak TTS engine, which supports 27 languages. odt2daisy enables the production of DAISY books with only opensource software, for example Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice.org, odt2daisy and eSpeak constitute a completely open-source software stack. The next step is the development of an accessibility evaluation and repair add-on for OpenOffice.org in order to ensure that documents produced with OpenOffice.org can be more accessible and serve as a better basis for exporting to other formats such as DAISY, PDF4 and HTML5. Vincent Spiewak started working on odt2daisy at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France) and continued the work at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) in the framework of ÆGIS, a research and development project co-financed by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme.

1. odt2daisy: digital talking books with open-source software Christophe Strobbe Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Belgium