DAISY talking books

DAISY is a digital reading format that can combine audio, text and graphical information in one production, making it accessible to a wide range of people with print disabilities.

  • DAISY books can be played on a DAISY player, or by using DAISY software on a computer.
  • DAISY makes it easier to move around the audio.
  • Large amounts of content can be compressed onto one DAISY CD. As a general rule, around 25 hours of audio can be recorded on a DAISY CD with no noticeable deterioration in the sound quality.

DAISY books

A DAISY book is a digital audio book, designed to allow a blind or partially sighted readers to move around the text as efficiently and flexibly as a print user. DAISY books allow the reader to:

make bookmarks

pause books

speed up or slow down

read or ignore footnotes

jump easily from chapter to chapter, heading to heading and page to page.

DAISY players

A DAISY player is similar to a CD player allowing you to access tracks very quickly and flexibly. Some smaller players use memory cards rather than CD’s and require DAISY books to be transferred to the memory card using a computer.


Some household CD players will be able to play DAISY books too if they have been designed to play the MP3 format (a common format for audio files) but will not provide the sophisticated navigation of a DAISY player.


Reading for leisure

If someone is reading a leisure title in the DAISY format, they may choose to just put the CD in their DAISY player and listen to the audio from start to finish. However, if they don't want to hear all the introductory matter, such as the publishing details of the print book or the copyright information, they may wish to skip this part of the book and navigate to the start of the story - this is now possible with DAISY.

Reading for study

If someone is reading a DAISY title for study purposes, they may want to dip in and out of the book, skip between chapters, headings and sub-headings, find specific words or references, add bookmarks or record their own notes for future reference - this is all now possible with DAISY..
http://www.rnib.org.uk/livingwithsightloss/readingwriting/Talkingbooksanddaisyplayers/Pages/talking_books_daisy.aspx