[Dtb-talk] FW: DAISY Consortium Releases Obi 2.0 - Free Accessible Open Source Multimedia Production Tool

[Andrews, David B (DEED)]

Dear DAISY Community:

The DAISY Consortium is pleased to announce the latest release of Obi, an open source production tool
for DAISY audio books utilizing the NCX navigation.

Obi 2.0 brings several significant new features as well as fixes of issues identified in earlier versions,
based on feedback and suggestions from the worldwide DAISY community.

Greg Kearney:  “Obi is used on a daily basis at Association for the Blind of Western Australia for the
production and conversion of books to DAISY format.  We have found it to be easy to use and able to
generate books that are of high quality.”


Obi 2.0 Features and Benefits:

  1.  Users can produce digital talking books (DTBs) conforming to both DAISY 3 and DAISY 2.02 standards.
  2.  Full accessibility - keyboard navigation, magnification of text and graphics, audio clues as well as support
for screen readers, including open source screen readers.
  3.  Bookmarking - any section or phrase can be bookmarked.
  4.  Customizable keyboard shortcuts per user’s individual preferences.
  5.  Supports internationalization - can be easily localized into other languages.
  6.  Minimal learning curve - simple and comprehensive GUI with logical grouping
of menu items and self-explanatory dialog boxes make Obi easy to learn.
  7.  Carefully designed set of intertwined views enables users to work simultaneously in various views on a
single application window.
  8.  Recording process caters to the needs of both - beginners and advanced users.
  9.  Users can import projects ranging from full-text full-audio DAISY book files to navigable (audio-NCX)
DAISY 3 books, DTBook XML and XHTML files, WAV & MP3 files.
  10. Automated project recovery feature reduces the possibility of losing data.
  11. Supports undo and redo operations to revert project to the desired state.
  12. Can be further customized for accommodating special requirements as Obi is open source.

In addition, Obi 2.0 now uses the latest version of the Urakawa SDK as its data authoring backend.
Urakawa SDK 2.0 has evolved as a result of the merger of the Obi and Tobi codebases, bringing
many advantages to both tools.

Please visit the Obi project page to download:  http://www.daisy.org/obi/download

The DAISY Consortium would like to extend a special thanks to all contributors for their valuable
feedback and continuous support to the Obi project which has helped Obi emerge as a powerful
DAISY book authoring tool.

Kind regards,

Varju Luceno

Director of Communications
DAISY Consortium