Enterprise software vendor Design Science, Inc., US, has announced the release of MathDaisy 1.0. MathDaisy enhances Microsoft's Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word to convert Word documents containing math notation to DAISY Digital Talking Books, ready to be read by students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with vision and learning disabilities, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia.
Save As DAISY is an open source software developed by Microsoft. Once installed, it adds a 'Save As Daisy' command to Microsoft Word XP, 2003, and 2007 that converts Word documents into DAISY's Digital Talking Book format.
DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is a globally recognised XML standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents, including Digital Talking Books (DTBook), digital textbooks, and synchronised audio/text books. DAISY is used by NIMAS (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) for accessible K-12 textbooks and by ePub, a widely used standard for digital books. The latest version of the DAISY standard requires that mathematics be represented in MathML, the World Wide Web Consortium's standard for representing math notation in XML.
Design Science develops software used by educators, scientists and publishing professionals, including MathType, Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, WebEQ, MathFlow and MathPlayer, to communicate on the web and in print. As per company estimates, these products are used by millions of people worldwide, and most of the mathematics in content today is created using these products.
