DAISY News

National Achievement Award winner John Russo lives in Texas. Teachers report that he has become popular on campus delivering "standing-room only" tutoring sessions to 20 or 30 students. Currently thriving in graduate school at Texas A&M University, John is a passionate advocate for RFB&D's services, which he began to use as an underclassman at Saddleback Community College in California. He describes how assistive technology levels the playing field for blind and visually impaired students, opening up a critical inroad to independence.

"Let’s compare independence in terms of a sightless individual with a sighted person. In a school environment, a sighted person can purchase a book at a book store; they have it right there immediately. Then as they read, they can use a highlighter and take notes on pertinent information that they’d like to relocate at a later time."

"With the RFB&D website now available to us, we can find a book title and either order it on the phone or find it online; and we can find the link to the download on that book. As soon as we hit 'Download,' within minutes we have that book on our PC and can load it into to our DAISY player. That gives us instant accessibility to this book, any time, anywhere. Late at night, early in the day, we have that book in the palm of our hand, and we can read it".

Read full article on the RFB&D blog.

Title: Bookshare - VR Stream Download Training

Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Time: 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM EDT

• Review of the Victor Reader Stream main features and benefits.
• How to download content from Bookshare and use Companion Software to transfer content to the VR Stream.
• Questions and Answers.

Register

The University of Colorado at Boulder invites speaker proposals for its 13th annual Accessing Higher Ground Conference that will take place November 15-19, 2010. Keynote Speaker: George Kerscher, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium. The conference focuses on the implementation and benefits of Assistive Technology and Accessible Media in the university and college setting. Other topic areas cover legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance. The creation of accessible media and information resources, including web pages and library resources are a particular focus of the event. For the main conference, accepted out-of-town speakers will receive a 10% discount off conference registration fees. Local speakers will receive a 5% discount. Additional incentives are provided for accepted pre-conference proposals. For more information, please go to the 13th annual Accessing Higher Ground Conference website.

Registrations are now open for this year's Round Table conference: Think Globally, Act Locally! The Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities is a trans-Tasman organisation formed in 1981 to facilitate collaboration between organisations and individuals interested in information access issues. For the first time, conference will be held in Auckland, New Zealand. Conference dates are May 23-25, 2010, with optional pre-conference tours on Saturday, May 22nd. Details are available on the Round Table Conference website.

Victor Reader Stream CD Edition combines the world renowned Victor Reader Stream and a special CD player accessory. Victor Reader Stream CD Edition is perfect for people who do not have a personal computer. It is the easiest way to transfer a collection of DAISY books on CDs onto one single, portable audio playback device, without the use of a PC.

Key Benefits:

• Ideal for readers who do not use a personal computer and who want the benefit of a pocket size Stream DAISY/MP3 player
• The perfect solution to transition from using Victor Reader Wave to Victor Reader Stream

Details are available on the HumanWare website.

Tobi, the open source DAISY authoring tool developed by the DAISY Consortium has now reached its first beta. We aim to release version 1.0 by the end of April 2010, but in order to meet this tight schedule we need testers! The more the better, so we can get feedback from a broad variety of users and environments. We offer support via developer and end user forums. You may also send queries directly to Daniel Weck, the lead developer of the Tobi project. Please visit the Tobi development site to download Tobi and get more information.

March 3rd, 2010, Palo Alto, CA – The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), awarded $5 million to Benetech, in collaboration with The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH and the U.S. Fund for DAISY (USFDAISY), to create a research and development center that will greatly improve the processes and availability of accessible images for students with disabilities. The new Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials Center (DIAGRAM) will develop tools and best practices that will make it easier and more cost-effective to create and use accessible images across a range of educational content.

The new Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials Center (DIAGRAM) will develop tools and best practices that will make it easier and more cost-effective to create and use accessible images across a range of educational content. More information is available in the press release.

The DAISY book of the DAISY International Technical Conference in English and the DAISY book of the German-language conference "Barrier-free Preparation of Documents" have been published and are available on the DAISY2009 Conference website.

The Ulverscroft Foundation and the IFLA Libraries Serving Persons with Print Disabilities Section are pleased to announce the outcome of the bids for funding from the 2010 program. Ulverscroft Foundation has made 20,000 Pounds GB available for individual and organization awards to assist the development of library services for print disabled people worldwide and to foster cooperation between library services serving these persons. Individual awards have been offered to:

Mark Freeman, Libraries Manager, South Tyneside Library Service and Chair of Share The Vision, UK

Mark as a public libraries manager wishes to build on existing relations between the libraries in the North East of England and the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Mark has been awarded 2,150 Pounds GB to visit the Associate Member of the DAISY Consortium, South African Library for the Blind and, especially, their Mini Libs service in local communities.

Kathy Teague and Wendy Taylor, Librarians, RNIB National Library Service, UK

Kathy and Wendy are responsible for coordinating the Cataloguing Working Group of the IFLA LPD’s Global Accessible Library Project and are involved in the acquisition of a new library management system by RNIB NLS. They wish to visit the Celia Library in Helsinki, Finland to study their implementation of the new FRBR bibliographic model [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] which permits the assigning of relationships between different accessible formats of the same work. Celia belongs to the Finnish DAISY Consortium and is the first specialist library in this field to implement this model. Their visit has clear potential to enhance the DAISY Consortium member RNIB’s services and worldwide developments. Ulverscroft has offered 2,700 to fund this visit.

Yasmine Youssef, Librarian at the Taha Hussein Library for the Blind and Print Disabled at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.

Yasmine is the library’s specialist in the production of DAISY books and wishes to visit DAISY South Africa to provide expert assistance in their development of DAISY production and to understand the challenges posed by accommodating 11 official languages. This opportunity will enhance her ability to develop services at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Associate Member of the DAISY Consortium) and to assist developments in other Arabic speaking countries. Yasmine has been awarded 2,550 Pounds GB to undertake this visit.

More information and the full list of award recipients can be found on the Ulverscroft Foundation website.

Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd. is pleased to announce the release of a new firmware for their DAISY Player PTN2. Version 3 has added support for: Microsoft Word .doc and unprotected WMA (Windows Media Audio) files.

The supported formats on PTN2 Version 3 are:

• DAISY 2.02, ANSI/NISO Z39.86/DAISY 3
• NLS, Bookshare, RFB&D
• TXT, HTML, DOC
• MP3, WAV, AMR-MB+, DAISY ADPCM2, OGG, WMA (unprotected)

Version 3 offers simplified operation and is more intuitive as it comes with faster touch key response and automatic bookmark numbering. More information is available on the PLEXTALK website.

The 4th European eAccessibility Forum will be held in Paris on April 12, 2010 and will provide an opportunity to hear first-hand about the eAccessibilty of public services from users with disabilities, public organizations and industries. The speakers are specialists involved in organizations representing users and consumers with disabilities, research organizations and companies operating in Europe or worldwide. The conference program is available on the 4th European eAccessibility Forum website.

The Korean DAISY Consortium is made up of 21 member organizations including regional libraries and related organizations. A list of all 21 members is provided in the Korean DAISY Consortium entry in our Members area.

The Final Draft of the DAISY Online Delivery Protocol Specification is available from the DAISY Consortium website Projects area.

The DAISY Online Delivery protocol is a web service API that facilitates the delivery of digital resources from service providers to end users. The protocol features a core set of operations that can be configured to enable a variety of different download models, making it a flexible and lightweight solution to the growing need for online delivery of published content.

The Working Group believes that the development of the specification is now complete and is seeking feedback through the public review phase, from February 18 to March 20, 2010. Please provide comments and implementation reports to the Working Group through the public feedback form available on the DAISY Consortium website at http://www.daisy.org/contact.

The IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) annual congress provides an opportunity to present library research and outcomes in Information Technology and Innovation in a multi-disciplinary international forum. The IFLA Information Technology, Cataloguing, and Classification and Indexing sections invite technologists, librarians and other interested parties working in the field of the Semantic Web to submit proposals for papers in a 4-hour joint session in Gothenburg, Sweden. This 4-hour session will start with a keynote presentation introducing the concepts of the Semantic Web and Linked Data. This is a call for additional papers that focus on how libraries can take over these technologies to create opportunities for their data and services on the Web. The deadline for submitting a detailed abstract (500 words) and full author details is February 28, 2010. More information can be found on the IFLA website.

AMIS is an open source, self-voicing software program that you can use to read DAISY books. The DAISY Consortium is pleased to announce that thanks to the efforts of the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB), AMIS is now also available in Swedish. You can download it on the AMIS project page of the DAISY Consortium website.

Join Brenda McBride, Product Manager at HumanWare, Viji Dilip, Manager of International Programs for Bookshare and Cherie Miller, University Program Manager at Bookshare on February 16th, 2010 to learn more about creating Bookshare memberships for college and university students. Other topics include finding, downloading and reading books, using Bookshare for undergraduate research projects and more. An accessible event code will be emailed to those needing an accessible format once registration is complete. Register here.

DAISY Member Vision Australia's Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team is working with the CFA (Country Fire Authority) to ensure their publications are accessible to people with disabilities. They have produced the FireReady Kit and seven other publications about bushfires. The FireReady Kit has been dispatched to all people who are members of Vision Australia library and reside in bush fire prone areas. CDA and DAISY versions were produced and 1350 CDs have been delivered to date. More information is available on the Vision Australia website.

Techshare India 2010 will be held in New Delhi on February 15th and 16th, 2010 at the India Habitat Centre. Speaking on the occasion, Ms. Shilpi Kapoor, Managing Director, BarrierBreak Technologies, said “Techshare India 2010 will offer workshops and presentations on accessibility and draw upon the wisdom of people who have tremendous experience in the field. It will also bring awareness about various accessible technologies available in market for the people with disabilities.” "Today technology is playing a vital role in the life of people and has become a necessity but unfortunately it is not equally accessible to all – especially to people with disabilities,” she added.

Participants can learn more about DAISY by attending the Affordable DAISY Players for Developing Countries presentation by Prashant Verma on February 16th, 2010. Avneesh Singh, Prashant Verma, and Dipendra Manocha will also run a workshop Open Source Tools for Creating DAISY Books on the same day. More information about Techshare India 2010 is available on the Techshare India 2010 website.

On February 3rd, 2010 National Talking Newspapers and Magazines (NTN and M) officially joined the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) Group. NTN and M provide national newspapers and magazines in the UK on tape, CD, DAISY CD and via MP3 download as well as in digital full-text format by e-mail for blind, partially sighted and other print disabled people. Lesley-Anne Alexander, Chief Executive of RNIB said: "This is a positive step for both organisations, reinforcing our commitment to blind and partially sighted people's right to read. By joining the RNIB Group, NTN and M can continue to develop their excellent service and increase the number of people they are able to reach." Details are available on the RNIB website.

DAISY Member RFB&D is hosting a Media Roundtable with their National Achievement Awards winners in Washington, DC on February 2, 2010. The 90-minute mid-day session will feature testimonials from individuals who are blind or severely dyslexic and have flourished on their educational paths, thanks to the crucial access to textbooks and assistive audio technology that RFB&D provides. Several students will be honored at RFB&D’s 50th annual National Achievement Awards on February 3rd. The roundtable participants include:

• Michael Jernigan, a Marine blinded by a roadside bomb in Fallujah, Iraq, is now thriving in college and speaking out for veteran wounded warriors hoping to rekindle their education.
• Alyssa Lang, diagnosed with dyslexia in her junior year in high school, struggled and compensated for years by literally memorizing every word she encountered. She graduated with a 4.31 GPA and now attends Notre Dame.
• 37-year old Monty Anderson, undeterred by blindness, finished his double master's degree in psychology and behavioral neuroscience – and is now a high achiever in law school.
• Michele Shepherd, diagnosed with dyslexia at 35, endured debilitating stigma and ridicule as a child, and is now making up for lost time with passionate advocacy and public speaking to kids in Virginia school systems.

Also, two nationally recognized education authorities will share perspectives:

• James Cibulka, President of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), is the father of a dyslexic daughter.
• Jane West, Sr. VP for Policy and Programs at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), is an acknowledged authority on education and disability issues.

Details are available on the RFB&D website.