DAISY - Digital Accessible Information SYstem
DAISY stands for Digital Accessible Information SYstem
DAISY is the information system recently developed as an international standard of the nest generation of Digital Talking books replacing conventional analogue cassettes and is designated for those who are blind or visually impaired and who have difficulties in reading printed materials. It is developed and promoted by DAISY Consortium and the headquarters is located in Switzerland, consisting of full membership organizations in 12 countries.
DAISY talking books enable users to jump directly to the specific paragraph, section and page from the contents. They can contain more than 50 hours in only one CD using latest compression technology like MP3. Moreover, permanent use and maintenance is also possible.
Recently the research and development of DAISY multimedia talking books have been started since it is recognized that DAISY is helpful for persons with not only visual disabilities but also learning difficulties and intellectual disabilities. This multimedia DAISY system creates synchronized audio, text and image so that users can listen to the audio while reading highlighted text and watching images on the same screen. If a computer has a refreshable pin display, Braille is also shown while the text is shown on the screen. Using these DAISY compliant products, disabled people are able to have access to the multimedia such as Internet homepage, electric books and digital TV.
However, in Japan, not like most of Western countries, the libraries for the blind can produce talking books without any permission from their copyright owners only for visually impaired people but not for people with other kind of disabilities. Therefore, while developing DAISY system, the activities of the National Council on Broadcasting for Persons with Disabilities consisting of 18 organizations including JSRPD are very important to promote DAISY. They are trying hard to deal with copyright issues in hoping that people with any kinds of disabilities will be able to benefit from these latest information technologies.