Karlen Communications
Text Only DAISY Book Production
Karlen Communication provides text only DAISY books using the eClipseWriter software. We can take scanned documents and convert them to text only DAISY. Contact Karlen Communications for pricing and timelines.
DAISY or Digital Accessible Information System is a digital talking book. You read DAISY content on either hardware or software DAISY players. DAISY is XML based and uses heading styles in applications such as Word as navigational structures in a book. Students can navigate by heading or by page in a book. The advantage to creating DAISY books is the ability of the student to move quickly to a chapter or page number. When using MP3 or WAV files of books with tone indexing it takes a long time to find a specific place in a book. Often a student will either find the place long after the topic has been discussed in class or will not find it during the class time. With a DAISY book, locating content is fast and easy.
The advantage to using IRTI's eClipseWriter is that eClipseWriter creates a small DNA file that can easily be sent via e-mail. A teacher or Educational Assistant can then use eClipseWater which is a small utility to open and save the full DAISY book. Of course the book can be put onto CD and sent through mail.
The DAISY DNA file also lets Boards of Education or Departments of Education set up secure web sites with libraries of textbooks that students themselves can access using eClipseWater or eClipse Reader and open the books on their own computers.
Karlen Communications also has Dolphin Easy Publisher which is a DAISY authoring tool comparable to eClipseWriter. Easy Publisher is used if recorded audio is needed. Because someone is reading the book into the computer costs will be slightly higher for this type of DAISY content.
DAISY books can now have images, lists, tables, voice changes when synthesized speech is added.
Karlen Communications does not have a license to distribute MP3 content or for specific synthesized voices. However, educational institutions may have these capabilities and instructions for implementing text and audio DAISY can be provided.
We also provide workshops on how to use eClipseWriter to create DAISY books. We can also provide workshops on using Dolphin Easy Producer or Dolphin Easy Creator. Currently we are investigating using the Microsoft Word Save as DAISY plug-in which creates an XML file from which a DAISY book can be created using tools such as DAISY Pipeline or eClipseWriter.
Copyright 2009 by Karlen Communications. Contact Karlen Communications