My work for the DAISY consortium

MathML-in-DAISY Working Group

For the last few years I had been a member of the MathML-in-DAISY Working Group of the DAISY Consortium. I was invited to work with the group after sending a bunch of technical suggestions to change the standard to the DAISY consortium.

Logo of the DAISY Consortium		Logo of the MathML-in-DAISY Work Group

In 2007 and 2008, I had the pleasure to present the groups' work with some colleagues at the Techshare conference in London and the @Science conference in Paris.

With the group efforts coming to a preliminary end as the standard is now completed and the structure guidlines are also finished, the last action as yet has been a paper about the DAISY Standard and its possibilities in the October-December issue of the IEEE Multimedia Magazine.

Daisy 3: A Standard for Accessible Multimedia Books [PDF]
	Dennis Leas, gh, LLC Emilia Persoon, Dedicon Neil Soiffer, Design Science Michael Zacherle, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology IEEE Multimedia, 2008, Volume 15, #4, pp28-37.
	The DAISY format is a widely adopted format for representing accessible content. This paper gives an overview of DAISY. It describes the history of DAISY books, what a DAISY book looks like on the inside and on the outside, and how DAISY books are created. The paper is a general overview, but there is an emphasis on how math relates to each of the topics. The paper concludes with reports about what readers think about using DAISY books.

Working as a Technical Consultant

Since August 2008, I am working for the DAISY Consortium as a part time Technical Consultant. It is my responsibility to help organize the beta test the new Save-as-DAISY-XML Software from Microsoft, as far as math is involved, and collect, verify and submit bugs to the developers. I also help beta testers if they run into problems with the software.

Some of my resources

I have written a short Introduction of MathML and its use within DAISY books. It is meant to be a starter with further references and aims to address primarily teachers, students, publishers and software and service developers. You can download a four page PDF document, but the more interesting alternative is undoubtedly the DAISY book of the document. Thanks to Dennis Leas to help me produce the DAISY book!

MathML-in-DAISY Introduction as a PDF		MathML-in-DAISY Introduction as a DAISY book

To fully access the DAISY book, you'll need a MathML compliant DAISY reader software. The only existing product I know is the gh Player Premium. You can download a 30 day trial version here.

This resource is currently only available in English. I definitely plan to re-translate it to German and will subsequently offer it here.

YouTube Videos

Some videos describing the DAISY technology in general and the Save-as-DAISY-XML software in particular are available at YouTube. I am not related with the videos at all, but I'll include them in this section anyway.

DAISY Makes Reading Easier

Open XML Accessibility and the DAISY Translator

Video 1

Video 2

Viewplus and American Physical Society publish DAISY books with math

Ettlingen, 21. April 2009                                     Michael Zacherle