This panel session covers all aspects of creating a DAISY book that contains math. Topics covered include authoring, using OCR, and MathML-aware DAISY players.
Last year, the DAISY Consortium approved an extension to their 2005 NISO standard[1, 15] for Digital Talking Books (DTB) that allows authors to include mathematics so that the math is accessible[17]. Standards based on the DAISY standard, such as NIMAS[3], can point to this extension as their method for inclusion of accessible math. They can also be used by technical journals, as is being done in a pilot project to publish the American Physical Society’s Physical Review as a DTB.
This panel session will provide an overview of the DAISY Standard and its various components, and describe how the Mathematics Modular extension fits into DAISY. Panel members will discuss some production environments and demonstrate MathML authoring of original text and using OCR to generate MathML from existing texts. Panel members will also demonstrate basic and advanced DAISY players reading mathematical content.
The DAISY specification is a comprehensive multimedia approach to accessing information. A DAISY book is made up of several files:
the Navigation Center (NCX)
textual content document (DTBook—XML) which includes mathematical content
synchronization file for audio, text, math, images (SMIL[2])
annotation and bookmark file
resource files for customized presentation of elements
The DAISY Consortium has a mechanism for enabling the creation of extensions for content that is not addressed in the core standard[14]. The first such extension is the mathematics module[17]. This module makes use of the existing MathML[16] standard. This means that existing tools that can author, manipulate, and display MathML can be leveraged to reduce the time and cost of adoption of the extension.
The use of existing standards (where they exist) is one of the requirements for extensions to DAISY. Other requirements for the development of a modular extension include:
open development of the extension with multiple companies and organizations
ensure that production tools exist to deliver content
demonstrate reading system support for the extension
create training and sample materials
extend the validation tools to support the standard
Math is embedded in the DTBook using MathML[16] islands. These islands exist in a different namespace to avoid collision with any DAISY element names. The MathML that is used can occur either inline or in a block/display context.
The top-level element of MathML is the