Welcome to the third Save As DAISY tutorial for Microsoft Word 2010. In previous tutorials
I’ve explored how to download and install the Save As DAISY Add In and how to use the
Add In to create a digital talking book in Word 2010.
In this tutorial I will demonstrate how the files can be read back using a DAISY reader.
A great deal has changed in the past couple of years. In the past DAISY Readers tended
rely on digital books in CD format which required a hardware device such as the Plextalk player
and reader. And while these are still available a great
deal has changed, in particular the size and range of devices that can now play and read
aloud the DAISY format. As you can see from this slide DAISY digital readers are now available
on a desktop computer, a CD device, hand held devices, mobile phones and even on the Internet.
A visit to the DAISY Consortium website also reflects the diverse nature of devices available
to play DAISY content. But for the purpose of this tutorial I’m
going to look at AMIS, a free to download DAISY Reader which runs on a computer. AMIS
is a software program that you can use to read DAISY books. It is self-voicing, meaning
that no specialised screen-reading software is needed in order for it to be used by visually
impaired people. So here is AMIS and I’m going to go to the
Help file and Contents and open the default DAISY Book so you can see some of the basic
features. On the left hand side you can the heading structures, so important to allow
navigation, and there are also options to change the speed of the reading voice as well
as colour options, magnification and even bookmarks to revisit favourite or important
parts of the book or even to start reading where you finished last.
Note too that in the menus everything can be controlled via the keyboard, this is particularly
important for those users who only use the keyboard to access and navigate content on
a computer. Okay, so I’m going to open the DAISY Book
that I created in the last tutorial. In the File menu there are options to open the DAISY
Book from a CD and even from the Internet so there is a great deal of flexibility on
how you can store and access a DAISY Book. Now in the last tutorial I saved the talking
book to the desktop. So by going to File and Open and navigating to the desktop I can see
the folder My Talking Books. Inside the folder there are two other folders.
Both are DAISY compatible, the DAISY 202 folder is for those users who have or prefer to use
older DAISY reading devices which use the ‘ncc’ format while the z3986 is a more
recent format of DAISY, that is the opf and ncx –these are the files are used to open
a DAISY book. Fortunately AMIS will read both formats.
So now AMIS is reading the conversion form earlier. Now I’m not sure if you can hear
the voice that is reading just now, but I’m using a Scottish computer voice called Heather.
This is because I’ve my default voice as Heather. When you use the Save As DAISY Add
In for Word, the default voice on your computer system is used to generate the audio files.
In the next tutorial I’ll show you how to change and set the default voice on your computer
system.
Thank you for watching.