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Zurich, Switzerland - The DAISY Consortium announces the release of Obi, a free, open source audio recording tool for the production of audio books which provide meaningful navigation. The output is fully conformant to the DAISY Standard (officially, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book). Obi enables individual users with a minimal amount of training to produce digital content that is accessible to people with print disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia, or cognitive disabilities. Obi is released under the LGPL license and is available for download at http://daisy-
George Kerscher, PhD, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium said, “The release of Obi is an important step in achieving the DAISY Consortium's vision of a world where people with print disabilities have equal access to information and knowledge without delay or additional expense.”
DAISY audio books created with Obi can be produced with chapters, sections, sub-sections and pages, providing navigation to the content. Obi is fully accessible using assistive technologies such as screen readers. In addition, Obi reduces the time required to work with sophisticated production tools and significantly reduces tool costs that may create barriers for some. For example, teachers can use Obi to produce accessible materials for their students quickly and easily, and organizations in developing countries and smaller organizations everywhere can create synchronized multimedia without a large investment in new technology.
Sandeep Kaler, Project Manager for the National Association for the Blind in New Delhi, India, describes his experience with Obi, “Obi functionality looks very similar to most Windows applications with familiar commands like Open, Save, Save as, Copy, Paste, etc. which reduces the learning curve. Obi is fully accessible with both open source and more sophisticated commercial screen readers which helps visually challenged users to be as effective as sighted users in most parts of the world. Another nice feature is unicode support in Obi; this enables users to produce DAISY books in different languages. I have produced Hindi DAISY books fluently with this software. And most important, Obi is an open source DAISY authoring tool which is easily available on DAISY website. User does not need to ask for permission and neither has to pay to utilize it.”
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