Welcome to this second DAISY tutorial on the DAISY Add In for Microsoft Word 2010. In the
last tutorial I looked at how to download and install the DAISY Add In for Word 2010
and in this tutorial I will look at the main features of the Save As DAISY Add tab and
how to convert a document to a DAISY digital talking book, that is a talking book which
features audio, navigation and other accessible elements such as images and tables with alternative
descriptions.
I’ll be using the Demofile document to demonstrate, and the Demofile document comes as part of
the Save As DAISY download. I’d also recommend you take some time to go through the other
files such as the Instruction Manual and Getting Started guides.
So you can see here that I have the demofile open. And I also have the Accessibility Tab
showing, now remember the Accessibility Tab appears after the download and install process.
So let’s explore some of the main features. I’ll work from right to left and in the
Help section help is available in the form of a Word document or manual and in a DAISY
Talking Book. Now you’ll need a DAISY reader to listen to this format but I’ll be covering
this in the next tutorial.
The next main feature is the Settings and you can see here there are limited options
to choose from such as how you paginate your document and the size of images you would
like to use in the exported or translated audio format.
Next is the Language option and there’s quite a range of languages to choose from.
Then the Footnote for adding accessible Footnotes to your document and then Import DAISY Styles
which I’ll be covering shortly. I’ll also be covering the Validate feature to ensure
your documents are valid and ready for the export or DAISY translation process and there
are also options to mark text as an Acronym or Abbreviations, so for example, you can
mark any abbreviations in your document and it will be translated as the full word in
the final audio translation.
And of course the final part, this is where you can choose to export the document to a
DAISY digital talking book. In this tutorial we are going to use the built-in DAISY Lite
Pipeline translator so I’ll be choosing and demonstrating the Full DAISY (from a single
Docx) but if you’re an advance user who is familiar with the XML format that option
is also available. If you’re unsure what the XML format is then don’t worry as the
Save As DAISY will do everything for you but I suppose the best way to explain in basic
term is that the XML file is essentially a container file or a file that contains information
that can be read and interpreted by other bit of software, for example the full DAISY
Pipeline translator.
So first of all let’s look at this Demofile document. I’m going to switch to the Home
tab and just check that the document contains the correct heading structure so I’m going
to select ‘Styles’ so the Style Panel appears and if I go through each of the headings
I can see that it does have some structure built-in, which is good. DAISY requires the
heading structure so when it converts a document to audio it uses the heading structure as
a way of navigating through the audio. You can also see the heading styles are here too
in the Ribbon so Word 2010 makes it really easy to add heading styles to a document.
I can also change the look of the Styles by selecting ‘Change Styles’ or alternatively
if I switch back to the Accessibility tab I can choose the DAISY Styles here. I’ll
stick with Word’s styles for just now.
Okay, so now I want to check that this document is valid and ready for the translation process,
so to do this I first of all Save the document and then select the Validate button.
So I can see there is an error. While it provides some information on the errors I really need
to find more. An excellent feature of Word 2010 is the Accessibility Checker and by selecting
File, Info and Check for Issues I can check the Accessibility of the document. So now
I can see there are some issues which need to be checked, such as line spacing, adding
alternative text to images and tables and there’s also an explanation to do this too.
Okay, I’ve made the changes, and I’ve saved the document and I need to Validate
it again. Good, that’s fine, now I’ll select Save As Full DAISY and the Talking
Book option, choose somewhere to save my DAISY book, say a folder on the desktop and give
my talking book an title, an author and select Translate and let the automated process take
over. Okay, that’s fine, everything has worked
smoothly, I’ll just check in this folder, and I can see the audio and other files are
all there. In the next tutorial I’ll show you how to
open the translated files with DAISY Talking Book software.
Thank you for your time.