DAISY in Spain

Francisco Martinez Calvo
Spanish National Organization of the Blind

Konnichi wa. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the siesta session. I call it that because where I come from it’s supposed to be the time when we should be sleeping instead of working. That’s not the case. It’s not because I think that my presentation is going to be especially boring, just boring.

I would like, first of all, to thank the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare for sponsoring this interesting symposium and, of course, the ATDO (Assistive Technology Development Organization) for inviting me to talk to you about what we are doing in Spain with DAISY. I’ve been working for ONCE for 20 years now, so I cut my teeth there. I’m now working for the Section of Culture and I’m also a member of the DAISY board.

I’ll tell you something about the production of DAISY books in Spain, which is as of today limited to the books that ONCE produces. ONCE is the National Organization of Spanish Blind Persons. We produce all types of materials for those Spanish citizens who are blind or visually impaired and are registered with our organization. We have been a full member of the DAISY Consortium since it was established in 1996. We have been producing these types of books regularly since 2004.
The DAISY books we produce and distribute today are the so-called “audio only with NCC” type of books. This means that it’s the audio with a small HTML file which allows you to navigate through the whole book. They are all read by professional narrators. Most of them are recorded in our own production centers. We have one in Madrid and another one in Barcelona. The rest are subcontracted to small recording companies.

A year before our production began (that is, 2003) we started our digitizing process, transferring into wave audio files all of our analog audio, which was around 16,000 books at that time. This digitizing process is not yet finished but it covers around 90% of our collection. We also set up a parallel process to build DAISY books out of these raw audio files. Today our audio collection has reached a mark of 20,000 titles, of which 60% are now available as DAISY books with a DAISY structure. Last year we applied this DAISY structure to 1,400 books coming from our digitally converted titles.

As I mentioned before, we have been producing DAISY books for nearly 5 years now. Last year we managed to produce around 900 new titles. Last year was also an important milestone in our short DAISY production history as the last day of 2008 saw the end of our analog audio production. During that time, we registered more than 1,800 requests for new DAISY titles. 400 of them were for educational materials. But as you can see from the figures I told you, we could only produce half of them. We give absolute preference to the production of educational materials even though in most occasions it means that we have to produce long and complicated books for just one user. Though general statistics say that we only produce half of the requests that we had, that is not the case for study materials. This is an area in which all requests are fulfilled.

Our production of DAISY books has been so far centered in the so-called “audio only” or “audio with NCC” type of books, which are on the one hand a very gratifying type of book for our users but, on the other hand, they are what I call a “dead end” type of book. Once you have produced an audio-only book there is nowhere you can go from there. You can change the audio format and there’s not much you can do with it unless you add other things.

That is why we are now giving priority to a more open type of production, as other DAISY members have already done with excellent results. We are studying the implications of switching to a source file-based DAISY production where the HTML or XML file with the full text of the book is the basis of all of the other output formats, be it DAISY or anything else. XML DAISY files are not the end of the production, as it happens with audio-only books, but the means to a variety of end formats, which will hopefully include Braille, large print and various types of DAISY-structured books. This new idea will require quite a few changes in our production lines and in our production philosophy.

We started distributing DAISY titles shortly after we started our DAISY production on a regular basis and it has been steadily growing since. We expect it to grow exponentially from this year onwards. In 2008 we started a gradual process to promote our users’ migration from our analog audio books to the DAISY materials. This process will take a total of 3 years. During 2008 we promoted the adoption of the DAISY system to those who were still reluctant to use our books and were using our books on tape and set up the end of the calendar year as the deadline for the production of new analog titles. The sales of analog players through ONCE were also discontinued. During this year, 2009, we will stop making copies of our existing catalog of analog materials. Access to already existing tapes will be available only through our library’s lending system. On the last day of next year, we will cease the distribution of all analog materials. So during this period last year and this year, a number of activities have been taking place in order to promote the use of DAISY to make sure that all of our users know about this technology (the players that they have available in the market, the advantages of moving to DAISY, et cetera).

When this started to be distributed among our users, we used CD as the primary medium of distribution. Thousands of CDs were posted to our members, which they needed to send back to the library. We still send DAISY books by the postal service (which, by the way, is still free in Spain for these types of materials). But in March, 2006 we also started making available our DAISY audio books through the digital library set up 6 months earlier. Between October 2005 and March 2006, those 6 months, the only materials available were the text files containing the Braille books or the text files we used to print our Braille books. Users could download it and read it in their computers or Braille note takers or emboss it on paper.
Then DAISY became available for download. We got an overwhelming response from our users. In the first month the total number of downloaded books went from 5,000 to 25,000. In the first 3 years the number of DAISY books downloaded multiplied by 10, from 600 in the first month to around 6,000 per month, a rate that hasn’t stopped growing since then. Today any ONCE member can choose from 11,500 titles in DAISY format. We have noticed with this new service that people that never used the library before or that stopped using it at some point decided to go back to reading our books. Most of them are young people who weren’t interested in getting books by post anymore and also those users who were tired of waiting for a title because we never had copies of it.

We still distribute books on CD but there is no such thing as a DAISY loan service in ONCE. We don’t claim our CDs back. The users can keep the book in their collection. They only pay us in a bulk price of 1 Euro per book. During the last year, though, new users could borrow DAISY books from our libraries. This was as a means of promoting the use of this technology. We distributed more than 7,500 books among those who had never used a DAISY book before, asking them to return them to the nearest library but once they tried it, they became addicted. That is when they start downloading or buying their own copies. During 2008, nearly 2,800 users downloaded more than 65,000 titles from our digital library.
We are now looking at new, wider and more efficient ways of distributing our DAISY books. Online distribution has been and still is a big success but not everyone has access to a computer at home or has the necessary skills to use it. CDs get damaged and sometimes it takes a few days to travel from one corner of Spain to the other. Today even a couple of days has become too long to wait for a book. We have looked into distribution through memory cards, which we think will be a big success as long as we don’t need to post them. Otherwise, we are making the same mistake again. But the idea of having a few books loaded into your memory card every time you visit the library is surely one of its main assets. Streaming is also another possibility, although not many users like sitting in front of their computers listening to their books.

A newer possibility is also now being studied, the use of the mobile phone for downloading and listening to your DAISY books. Last year a Spanish software company (also a friend of the DAISY Consortium) called CodeFactory released their mobile DAISY player. This company is already very well-known in Spain among blind and visually impaired persons for their Mobile Speak range of products, which uses text-to-speech technology to help this group of citizens make use of their mobile phones. The mobile DAISY player can be installed in any Nokia Symbian 9 mobile phone which carries a memory card. CodeFactory is currently working on a version for Microsoft mobile devices like Pocket PC.
The DAISY content is then stored in the card and the software can play text only, audio only and hybrid books (text with audio). It allows for DAISY navigation through the phone’s keypad as well as the use of bookmarks, voice annotations and variable playback speed control. It supports both DAISY 2.02 and DAISY 3 books. For those users with enough residual sight and for those books which include text, these can be read using the mobile phone screen as the mobile DAISY player allows for font size and color customization.

Still, the user needs to have the book in order to load it into their mobile phone. It can be one of our CDs or a downloaded copy from our digital library but we envisage a time when books will be downloaded directly into their mobile phones, especially text-only DAISY books which come in very small files. Then they can be read using this TCS engine installed in the phone or using Mobile Speak. Access of the ONCE digital library through webpage-accessible mobile phones with an internet connection might become the most used method to download our DAISY books in the near future. Listening to a book with your mobile phone may not be the most pleasurable experience in the world but there are a number of advantages in doing so that we must not forget. First of all, who does not have a mobile phone? By adapting your mobile phone to this new service, you are avoiding buying a specific hardware player that you will probably use only for this purpose. Mobile phones are used everywhere, even in developing countries where thinking of buying dedicated, expensive equipment is out of the question. Once you have made a few phone calls with your mobile phone, you know everything you need to know about it to start using it as a DAISY book player, so you need no intensive training.

I know there is more to it than just having access to a mobile phone. For instance, we need to bring the books into that mobile phone. Besides, as of today not all mobile phones support reading DAISY books and certainly not the most inexpensive ones. Nevertheless, I believe that our mobile phones, the same ones young people use to listen to their music, may potentially become the most wide-spread DAISY player in the world in a not too faraway time in the future.
Going back for a moment to the number of DAISY books that ONCE produced last year (around 1,000 titles) and putting it together with the number of books produced in other accessible formats (that includes Braille and E-text files), we barely reach 4% of the number of printed books published in Spain during 2008 (around 80,000 titles). This figure, I’m afraid, faithfully resembles the percentage of accessible works that blind and visually impaired persons have had access to for many years, compared always to the total amount of printed books. In the past, though this figure has always been considered to be too low, we saw ourselves and our lack of resources as somehow responsible for this situation. Besides, we were producing materials in a format that was specific to our users that were very expensive to produce and which had to be kept specific to justify the copyright exception that protected our service.

But today the situation has dramatically changed. There are some factors that have provoked a switch in the way we look at these figures today. First of all, with the new copyright law passed in 2006 in Spain we got rid of two words that kept our hands tied in the past, “specific” and “Braille.” Today we do not have to produce using a specific format but with a technology that (I’m quote from the law) “adapts to the user’s needs.” Secondly, we now have DAISY, a system initially developed to serve the needs of blind and visually impaired persons but which has become an international standard that can be used by and for anyone. Last but not least, we have the more recent concerns about accessibility. We have laws that force public institutions to become accessible in every sense and we have the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We now have an international mandate to make information accessible and we have an open standard to make that possible. That’s DAISY.

All of these factors have shaped the way ONCE looks at the development of DAISY in Spain in the short and medium-term. We have three clear objectives: to promote the use of DAISY as a publishing tool outside of our own organization, to promote the adoption of the DAISY standard by the manufacturers of mainstream players and to extend the distribution of DAISY titles outside ONCE’s library network (that is, taking DAISY to the public library service). In a nutshell, we seek to put DAISY into the mainstream.
To shrink the gap between the DAISY documents available and the total of existing documents, we need to see DAISY content being produced by those who generate the original content. We need to have mainstream players, from iPods to car CD players, handling DAISY content. And we need to see DAISY books in every library and hopefully in every bookshop in the country.

When it comes to content producers, we now have two mainstream tools that we can offer to influence their publishing workflows. One of them is the “Save as DAISY” option being developed by Microsoft for their Office suite of products. This tool that will be available in millions of computers all around the world will bring DAISY into millions of homes and companies and will allow easy and fast conversion of structured Microsoft Word documents into full DAISY books.
The other tool is the new Adobe InDesign CS4, which is becoming the most-used professional publishing tool and which allows publishers to create DAISY dtbooks just by saving the document as XML using the DAISY dtd. With these two tools and some basic structuring concepts, we can now ask content producers to create accessible documents without them really knowing that they’re doing that. Only a few months ago we found out about a public initiative that triggered our commitment with the objectives that I have just mentioned. This initiative came from Catalonia’s Open University, which has developed a service for the students which offers all of the educational materials in different electronic formats. Among these is DAISY. I’m glad to say that ONCE has nothing to do with this. The technicians at this open university, which is in the northeast of Spain, researched for months looking for an open and fully accessible standard that allowed them to offer truly accessible content to all their users. I’m also glad to say that, when looking at this technology, they didn’t have only the few blind and visually impaired students they have in mind but every student in the campus. When I heard about all of this, I couldn’t help feeling very proud of being a part of the DAISY Consortium, knowing that we have somehow helped create what these technicians (after testing a number of formats for a few months) considered to be (and I’m quoting) “the best solution to the accessibility problems of their content.”

I remember that when they showed it to me, they showed me this prototype showing an audio DAISY book with full text. They called it “karaoke.” It’s called “the karaoke type.” This experience made us contact other open universities in Spain. We created a recently created private open university in Madrid, Udima, who were at that time setting up their server with the objective of distributing most (if not all) of their education content for new students online. They are very excited about the use of DAISY as the format that will fill all of their students’ needs. Besides, as they are also publishers of printed materials (they print their own books, as well) and users of InDesign and knowing that most of the authors are also users of Microsoft Word, they are really committed to include the DAISY dtbook as one of their requirements for submitting and distributing content among both their clients and staff.
That is one of the reasons why we have published this book. This is hot from the press. They are guidelines for producing DAISY books the way we produce them at ONCE. It’s only in Spanish and it’s intended for everyone outside of ONCE who wants to produce DAISY books, be it a public institution or organization for the blind, institution for disabled people, whatever. We would also like to distribute this in Latin America so the countries there that are now beginning to produce DAISY books will have some basic guidelines on how to do it.

We also have another very important factor, which is the public library sectors, the interest of the public library sector in providing full access to their collections, which has also become very active lately. Recent changes in our legislation are pushing the Spanish public library network into a new and more inclusive range of services. We at ONCE know that the library service we provide, effective as it may be, does not cover all of the possible activities a public library offers. Besides, the ONCE library system is by its own nature a closed service limited to those persons with severe sight problems. Public libraries, on the contrary, are open systems where integration of all possible communities and population groups is at the basis of the service that they provide. We believe that by cooperating with them in providing joint services, blind and visually impaired persons will enrich their reading experience with a long list of other, more integrating activities. To close and summarize my presentation, I would say only two things. We want to produce more and better but we don’t want to be the only DAISY producer. We want to provide a faster, better and wider distribution but we don’t want to be the only DAISY provider. I think we shouldn’t be. Doomo arigatoo gozaimashita. Thank you very much.

Floor: I am working at the Hirakata Municipal Library in Osaka. I have one question. Listening to the situation in Spain, it seems that you are quickly promoting the digitization of documents. That was my impression. In Japan, as well, we have a big problem. That is to say, this very powerful Braille library has completed producing analog documents and is proceeding to produce more and more digital documents. But there are especially the elderly people who cannot keep up with this progress. The users are reacting against such movement towards digitization. There will be people saying that they can only use tape recorders. The library is having a problem handling this situation. I’d like to ask if you have similar problems in Spain or not and, if so, how are you trying to respond to the needs of these people who cannot keep up with these new technologies?

Chair: There’s another question. Dipendra -san, please. I’d like to ask two of you to ask these questions and then respond at once, please.

Dipendra: My question is on-you said that the books on the CDs are provided to the end users at a minimum cost of 1 Euro and you don’t get those CDs back. Is that seen as a sale of the book and if yes, are you paying any royalties to the publishers for it?

Chair: Francisco, would you like to respond?

Calvo: To the first question, I was also afraid that our users wouldn’t accept DAISY technology as easily as they have. But I am happily surprised to see that once they try one of these books, they just don’t want anything else. Their only problem is to find the money to buy the player, in most cases, not the book itself. Especially students find that the advantages that it brings to them are just amazing. They won’t go back to tapes again. So, so far, we’re not really having problems with this.
We have also started late compared to other countries in switching from analog to digital when it comes to services precisely because we were afraid of the reaction of our users. We are doing it step by step in a 3 year step, as I explained, trying to make it easier for them to get adapted to these new books. But one thing is clear: by the end of 2010, we won’t be producing or distributing any more analog cassettes. We just can’t find cassettes anymore, so they have to get used to it the same way they got used to 4 tracks when it came to ONCE a long time ago and they had to give away the 16 track tapes (I don’t know how many tracks they had). They have to get used to it. Someone who wants to read, reads, in whatever format. I don’t think DAISY is more difficult or easier than any other format.

To the second question, we don’t sell books. That’s for sure. If we were a publisher selling books, then we would be out of the exception. We charge 1 Euro per book as a symbolic price for the service we give, not for the book itself. The service, as you all know here, costs much more than that but you know what happens with free stuff. People want everything tomorrow. But no, we are charging for the service, not for the book.