Digital Talking Books

Table of Contents

1) What Are Digital Talking Books?

1A) White Papers on Digital Talking Books

1B) Digital Talking Book Specifications

2) Who's Developing Digital Talking Books?

3) Digital Talking Book Players

3A) Hardware Products

3B) Software Products

3C) Authoring Tools

3C) eReader Reviews and Accessibility Information

What Are Digital Talking Books?

White Papers on Digital Talking Books

• White Papers & Publications from the DAISY Consortium
  1. What Is A Digital Talking Book?
  2. DAISY Is... (An Explanation) (by George Kerscher) [note: DAISY is an acronym for the "Digital Accessible Information System", an open international standard for encoding accessible multimedia]
  3. Reading the DAISY Way
  4. Converging Standards in Electronic Books (by George Kerscher)
  5. The Theory Behind DTBs & Intelligent Reading Systems
  6. The Sound-Proof Book: Rights Conflict & Access to Commercial EBooks for Persons with Disabilities
  7. DAISY for All: Publishers' Collaboration Enabling Print Access
  8. Access to All Sorts of Information: Utopia or Realistic Goal?
  9. Priorities for Moving Forward with a Global Library
  10. Shaping the Vision of the Global Library Online
  11. The DAISY Consortium in the Year 2014 & Beyond
• Surpassing Gutenburg: a white paper by Janina Sajka and George Kerscher, issued by American Foundation for the Blind

Digital Audio Book Specifications

• DAISY Specifications
  1. DAISY 3, Release 2005
     1. Errata for DAISY 3, Release 2005
     2. Road Map to DAISY 3.0 Specification (May 2004)
     3. Digital Talking Book 3-06 Expanded DTD
  2. Modular Extensions to DAISY
     1. DAISY/NISO Modular Extension Guidelines
     2. MathML in DAISY Modular Extention
     3. Braille in DAISY Project
     4. Scaleable vector Graphics (SVG) in DAISY Project
  3. DAISY 2.02 Skippable Structures Recommendation (June 2003)
  4. DAISY 2.02 Specification (February 2001)
     1. DAISY 2.02 Specification Errata (July 2001)
  5. DAISY Specifications Prior to 2000
     1. DAISY 2.01 Specification (22 September 1999)
     2. DAISY 2.0 Specification (21 September 1998)
• NISO's Standards for Digital Talking Books
  1. ANSI/NISO Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

Who's Developing Digital Talking Books?

• DAISY Consortium
  • The DAISY Consortium's Mission & Goals
  • The DAISY Consortium's Strategy
  • DAISY Consortium Members
  • DAISY Meetings & Exhibitions
  • Latest News from the DAISY Consortium
• DAISY For All, an organization dedicated to ensuring access to DAISY-formatted materials in Japan, India and Thailand
• National Library Service for the Blind (NLS)
• National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
  1. ANSI/NISO Z39.86: Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

Digital Talking Book DTB Players

Sub-Index

1) Hardware DTB Players

2) Software DTB Players

Hardware DTB Players
(arranged alphabetically, following a master index)

• DAISY's Master List of Hardware & Software Digital Talking Book Products
  
  
• Plextor's PlexTalk Family of Digital Talking Book Players
  1. PlexTalk PTR2 (can also record up to 90 minutes of audio)
  2. PlexTalk PTN1
  3. PlexTalk PTN2
  4. purchasing PlexTalk products
• Telex's Talking Book Products
  1. EZDaisy Digital Talking Book Player
  2. Telex Tutor Digital Talking Book Player
  3. Telex Scholar Digital Talking Book Player
  4. Telex Professor (DTB player, Talking Book cassette player & radio)
• Digital Talking Book Readers from HumanWare:
  1. Humanware's Classic DTB Players
  2. Humanware's Compact DTB Players
  3. Support Files for Humanware's DTB Players

Software DTB Players
(arranged alphabetically, following a master index)

• DAISY's Master List of Software & Hardware Digital Talking Book Products
  
  
• DAISY for All Open Source Software:
  1. AMIS: Adaptive Multimedia Information System (freeware), is free, open source DAISY book playback software, designed to bring DAISY-formatted materials to users of limited means
     1. subscribe to the AMIS-Users emailing list
• Book Wizard Reader (APH)
• EasyReader (simple synchronized digital audio playback)
• EclipseReader
• FSReader (works on both PCs and Freedom Scientific's PAC Mate line of products)
  1. on March 22, 2006, Freedom Scientific announced that on April 10, 2006, FSReader will release an upgrade with support for RFB&D's digitally formatted books
• TAB Reader (provides Thai & English playback)
• TPB Reader (kan laddas ned gratis)
  1. TPB Reader (freeware/runs in Windows/info in English)
  2. Playback 2000 och för högskole- och universitetsstuderande
• Humanware's software-based DTB programs

Authoring & Conversion Tools for DTBs

• The Urakawa Project: a software development toolkit (SDK) for accessible multimedia as well as real-world Daisy applications built with the SDK, such as Obi, the audio-only Digital Talking Book authoring tool; Obi is a powerful, easy to use, authoring tool, accessible and internationalized. The intended audience of Obi is the individual DAISY reader who wants to create her own DAISY contents.
• DBB's STD editor produces structured text documents in XML using the DAISY/NISO standard for Digital Talking Books
• DBB's STEB generator produces a Digital Talking Book using synthetic speech
• Dolphin Publisher
  1. EasyProducer
  2. EasyConverter
• EclipseWriter, from IRTI

Reviews of, and Accessibility Information on, eReaders

• Information from RNIB's eReader Resources
  • eBook Info fron RNIB
  • eBook readers compared by RNIB
  • what to look for in eReaders (RNIB resource)
    • Apple iPad Accessibility (RNIB Word Document, 44KB)
    • eBook reader features overview (RNIB Word Document, 96KB)
• Amazon's kindle talking menus promise more choice for blind and partially sighted readers (RNIB)
• Text-to-Speech on eBook readers (RNIB resource)

Terminal Index

1) Libraries for the Blind

2) Finding Etexts on the Web

3) His (Web)Master's Choice

4) Blindness-Related Resources on the Web and Beyond

5) Camera Obscura

or return to Read 'Em & Speak's Front Page

This page was recreated on June 10, 2000
Last updated November 9, 2010