Open Source Publishing Tools from the DAISY Consortium

George Kerscher (Daisy Consortium)

The DAISY Consortium has a variety of open source tools available under LGPL. They include the DAISY Pipeline, which is designed to take multiple input formats and transform the content into a variety of consumer ready products.

In addition, Obi, an audio authoring tool will be described. This is all based on an SDK that can be used by anybody to help move into multimedia publishing.

George Kerscher

Daisy Consortium

George Kerscher Ph.D. – “In the Information Age, access to information is a fundamental human right.”

George Kerscher began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term “print disabled.” George is dedicated to developing technologies that make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the hands of persons who are blind or who have a print disability. He believes properly designed information systems can make all information accessible to all people and is working to push evolving technologies in this direction.

As Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and President of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Kerscher is a recognized international leader in document access. In addition, Kerscher is the Senior Officer of Accessible Technology at Learning Ally in the USA. He chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee, the EPUB Maintenance working group and the W3C’s Steering Council for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). George also serves on the USA National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) Board.