Office Tweaks

Microsoft Word will soon talk to you!

by Jerome Locson on November 14th, 2007

The Microsoft - DAISY Consortium Collaboration, to translates text to speech files.

Here’s a great news for those who are having reading prints problem or shall we says print disabilities. Microsoft collaborated with DAISY (Digital Access Information SYstem), Consortium to deliver an optional plugin which enable Microsoft Word documents be saved as “Save as DAISY”, which is basically in the format of XML tagged as DAISY XML.

The DAISY Consortium of 70 nonprofits has aimed since 1996 to make all published information available to people with visual impairments and learning disabilities. The acronym stands for Digital Accessible Information System.

According to Microsoft PressPass website,  it is a tool for Microsoft Word, to be released as a downloadable plug-in at no charge early next year, will enable the translation of millions of Open XML documents into DAISY XML, the lingua franca of the globally accepted standard for digital talking books.

Here’s an except from the presspass:

Now imagine instead that you were suddenly deprived of all that rich visual data and that the information was presented in one crude mass of undifferentiated text that you had to slog through sequentially in linear fashion from cover to cover.

For the 180 million blind or visually impaired people worldwide and the millions more who are otherwise print disabled, unable to process text because of cognitive, learning, developmental, perceptual or physical disabilities, that is often what it feels like when using analog audio recordings to access the same information the rest of us take for granted in books or on screen.

“When you don’t see print, you lose more than the ability to read words,” explains Jim Marks, director of services for students with disabilities at the University of Montana, who went blind as an undergraduate in the early 1980s. “You lose the ability to see the page, jump around in the text and be drawn to bolded or italicized information.”

“When I switched from the ability to read print to audio, it was like a stream of consciousness. Trying to find the page number on an audio cassette was a miserable experience.”

In an increasingly information-driven society, it’s an issue of equity, Marks says, particularly for blind or visually impaired students. “It’s not just access to information that gives students equal footing, but the ability to manipulate that information.”

The so called “Save as DAISY” was announced onsite at the Microsoft TechEd IT Forum held in Barcelon. You can check Microsoft Europe Event for the video interview about this announcement. Also, check out DAISY website for its press release.

Now Microsoft Word will be talking!

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POSTED IN: File Formats, General, Microsoft, Productivity, Word