Yesterday marked the first public beta release of Olearia, a free and open source DAISY talking book player for Mac OS X Leopard. DAISY is an international standard for digital talking books for the blind and print disabled. Previously, there was no actively developed and supported DAISY player available for OS X users, so the release of Olearia is fantastic news for those with all types of print disabilities.
Olearia is a DAISY digital talking book player for the Macintosh computer platform. Olearia will play DAISY version 2.02 and DAISY/NISO 2005 digital talking book. This version 0.90b will play audio only and full text full audio books. The final version of Olearia will support text only DAISY books as well. Olearia supports VoiceOver. Olearia requires MacOS X version 10.5 or better.
The Olearia team have also converted their user manual to a DAISY book which is available at the same website.
Olearia is currently only available in English localisations but the team are actively looking for people to translate the interface into other languages – contact details are available on their web page.
- Ricky Buchanan
I have just installed Olearia v.0.9.5 on a student’s computer–OS X 10.5.8 and tried to open the RFB&D text, Prentice Hall Biology, Daisy v.2.02. It doesn’t work. What am I doing wrong?
The reason that you cannot play RFB&D books with Olearia is that all RFB&D DAISY books require a UAK (user authorization key). I suggested contacting the developer of Olearia, Greg Kearney his email is: gkearney at gmail dot com to see if they are planing to support RFB&D playback.
I just read on the RFB&D website that they will give you the UAK if you call them – as long as you’re a member, I assume.
I downloaded the beta version of Olearia but can’t figure out how to use it or search a book to download from bookshare. The program keeps quitting on me as well. Are there step by step instructions somewhere? thanks,
@Charlene: Olearia doesn’t have a built in link to bookshare – you need to use the Bookshare website to download books, not Olearia itself. If you’re having problems with Olearia itself, I can only suggest you contact the developers – their email addresses are on the download page we linked from here.