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