As announced on November 13th last year, the guys from the Microsoft Office team released a plug to help people with a handicap ‘read’ Word documents. It’s a simple software add-in for MS Office that converts text documents from Word into audio files, so people with a reading disability (or blind people) can still ‘know’ what’s in the document.

The add-in appears in the menu and shows as “Save As DAISY” (image below), just like when you’d save for an older version of MS Office, or in a different format. The plugin has been created together with Sonata Software and DAISY (which is an abbreviation for Digital Accessible Information System). The software allows you to save Open XML-based text documents as DAISY XML, which can then be converted to the DAISY Talking Book format (DTB). However, this last bit does require an extra bit of software called Pipeline, and is not included in the plug. As shown below, the plug is compatible with Microsoft Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP. I’ve experienced that during the install, the loader bar does not make progress very fast, and then jumps almost straight to the end. Might be because my demo laptop is pretty full already, but it’s just so you know. :)

The cool part about a DTB book is that the audio file encloses part of, or the entire source text plus a joint file that makes sure the text lights up as it is being read. Nice job!

Links:
Announcement Press Release
Download the plug
DAISY Pipeline (updated on May 7th)
MS Presspass: DAISY Virtual Pressroom