OpenOffice.org with odt2daisy is now able to produce DAISY 3.0 XML books and Full DAISY Books (XML + Audio).

DAISY is the standard for Digital Talking Books, developed and maintained by the DAISY consortium and was adopted by NISO as a ANSI/NISO standard (Z39.86). It is the world’s most widely used format for Talking Books for blind, visual impaired, print-disabled or learning-disabled people.

OpenOffice.org with odt2daisy is therefore the only rich, cross-platform, accessible, free and open source authoring environment for DAISY books, which would be a tremendous addition to the disability community.

odt2daisy enables authors to produce audio using the Text-To-Speech engine available on the operating system. Audio Languages available at this time out-of-the-box are:

• Windows: English
• Mac OS X: English with an high quality voice (Alex Mac voice).
• Linux / Solaris: up to 27 languages using espeak, including French, English, Spanish, Italian, Germain, Russian (see: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html)

Odt2daisy was written by Vincent Spiewak and released under LGPL 3.0 licence so it can be used, modified and redistributed for free.

Odt2daisy includes DAISY pipeline-lite, another open-source LGPL software developed by DAISY Consortium. It uses of LAME MP3 encoding technology.