DAISY Consortium
Organization size: Not-for-Profit Organization made up of full members, associate members and friends
Key product/service items: develop and maintain software for accessible reading
Accessibility website overview: The Daisy website is vast in its breadth and comprehensive in its coverage of the organization’s mission, goals, values, accessible reading solutions, training and support initiatives, resources for the blind and print disabled persons, organizations involves in making books accessible, as well as an extensive listing of projects that the DAISY Consortium has been involved. The website gives visitors an insider’s view of the organization’s history, minutes of all meetings, publications released, and a Wikipedia page link on the purpose and usage of Daisy. An up-to-date Sitemap provides the navigation map for site visitors.
Key statements on ICT product and services accessibility:The DAISY Consortium is an international association that develops, maintains and promotes international DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) Standards. A reading disability can affect any part of the reading process, including difficulty with accurate or fluent word recognition, or both, word decoding, reading rate, and reading comprehension. Common indicators of reading disability include difficulty with phonemic awareness - the ability to break up words into their component sounds, and difficulty with matching letter combinations to specific sounds (sound-symbol correspondence), and also memory problems.
Technologies like DAISY can help people around the world with learning difficulties such as reading disabilities, dyslexia, illiteracy, or vision loss. Members of the Consortium actively promote the DAISY Standard for Digital Talking Books because it promises to revolutionize the reading experience for people who have print disabilities. Specifically, the Consortium's vision is that all published information is available to people with print disabilities, at the same time and at no greater cost, in an accessible, feature-rich, navigable format. The DAISY Consortium has established a mission and goals in order to make this vision a reality.
Key areas of accessibility work:
Authoring and production tools: http://www.daisy.org/tools/production
Conversion tools and services: http://www.daisy.org/tools/conversion
Digital content creation and distribution: http://www.daisy.org/tools/content
Hardware playback tools: http://www.daisy.org/tools/hplayback
Software playback tools: http://www.daisy.org/tools/splayback
Mobile applications: http://www.daisy.org/tools/mobile-applications
Text-to-speech: http://www.daisy.org/tools/text-to-speech
All tools: http://www.daisy.org/tools/all
Organization accessibility website: http://www.daisy.org/tools-services
Contact information:
The DAISY Consortium
Grubenstrasse 12
8045 Zurich, Switzerland
http://www.daisy.org/contact