Partners

The DAISY Consortium (www.daisy.org) is an international association located in Switzerland. Its membership is global and directly involves 10 European countries. The Consortium develops standards (Digital Accessible Information System - DAISY) and applications, which conform to recognised standards for the production, distribution and use of accessible information covering the whole range of published documents (from leisure reading to highly structured text books and educational material).

Strategically, the DAISY Consortium aims at incorporating accessibility into mainstream digital publishing workflows. In this respect, the incorporation of key accessibility requirements (covering navigation, text and audio synchronisation, support for MathML, support for text-to-speech production and global language support [vertical, left-to-right and right-to-left writing systems]) into the revised EPUB (eBooks) standard (version 3) adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum in October 2011 is a milestone.

A prerequisite of successful lifelong learning (from school to post compulsory educational opportunities) is to have access to knowledge and information whatever the special needs of an individual person are. DAISY follows the principles of universal design which aim to deliver the best results – meaning maximum benefit to target groups including people with a broad spectrum of print disability related special needs – at a minimum of additional costs.

The DAISY Consortium’s input to the ICT4IAL network activities will specifically focus on Quality Assurance, particularly regarding the production, distribution and use of accessible information (eBooks = electronic documents and books of any kind). In addition, the DAISY Consortium will contribute to the development of the guidelines, their Implementation as well as participate in dissemination and exploitation activities focusing on their global network.