Hi, That format is primarily for the blind. The format doesn't really do what is wanted. You can either have xml files which can be read by a screen reader and special software or mp3 recordings or both, but the speech isn't generated any differently than for plain text files. In fact, I download about 100 DAISY books per month and I always convert to plain text. The DAISY software I've used is better about handling new pages and navigation than plain text but the speech output is still the same. There is no way to do custom pronounciations or anything that I'm aware of. Also, that format is specifically designed for the blind and I doubt there is much mainstream support for it. Tools to convert tend to be expensive from what I've seen. At 01:55 PM 3/14/2006, you wrote:
In case you have not seen it yet, I'd suggest taking a look at DAISY: http://www.daisy.org/
Andrew
On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Jeroen Hellingman (Mailing List Account) wrote:
Hi All,
I am studying the options for preparing ebooks for text-to-speech. Does anybody have experience with that and willing to share experience.
I am looking at things like SSML, aural-CSS, and text-to-speech software. Any software that can support this? My intention is to add the relevant tags to my TEI master, and generate SSML from that, feed that to TTS software to obtain audio files (Ideally, I would only post the SSML, and let people regenerate the speech when needed). Any tools that can be advised?
Things to consider are additional tags to disambiguate words with identical spelling (read and read; record and record, for example), and to help pronouncing dates, currency amounts, measures, abbreviations, etc.
Issues I found is lack of support for things like aural CSS, expensive software, etc.