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.