Olearia DAISY book reader for Leopard

By Ricky Buchanan • October 31, 2008

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.

Website: Olearia

- Ricky Buchanan

Categories: Neurologically Impaired, Supporters, Text to Speech, Users, VoiceOver
Tags: audio books, DAISY, free, olearea, oleria, open source, talking books

About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 34 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websites she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

3 Comments For “Olearia DAISY book reader for Leopard”

Hester Brooks Sep 24th, 2009 at 3:03 am

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?
Sam Nov 7th, 2009 at 9:49 am

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.
Margo Nov 14th, 2009 at 10:01 am

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.

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