Save As DAISY—MS Word Add-In

Save As DAISY—MS Word Add-In

Introduction / Purpose

The SaveAsDAISY is a free add-in for Microsoft Word. It is an easy to use MS Word based production tool for creating accessible documents in popular accessible publishing formats.
The tool was originally developed by Microsoft, and its development has been revived by DAISY Consortium due to heavy demand. It is based on the powerful conversion engine of DAISY Pipeline, which is extensively used by DAISY members for producing accessible publications in DAISY multimedia, EPUB 3, braille and large print.

Project Vision

Provide an open source, free and easy to use MS Word based production tool, which enables everyone to create accessible publications in the accessible publishing format of their choice.
Keep the community abreast with the latest developments in the accessible publishing, by continuously upgrading the tool to the evolving accessible publishing formats.

Status

The latest test version 2.7.2 beta was released on September 9, 2022. The most important achievement of this release is refactored code base and incorporation of Pipeline 2, which provides the base for transforming the add-in from a DAISY production tool to a multi format production tool. Most of these improvements are invisible to the users at this time, but provide a robust base for supporting new accessible publishing formats. Other attractions of the release include:

  • Unified installer, which can install the add-in on different versions of MS Word (From Office 365 to old versions like Office 2003).
  • Improved visualization of the state of the conversion with a progress bar and conversion messages.
  • As per the demand from the users, provided support for 32bits SAPI voices by updating Pipeline 1 to 32 bit Java.
  • Continues support for converting a structured Word document to a multimedia DAISY book having text, images and recording of the content in text-to-speech voices. This format also known as Full DAISY provides a rich reading experience to people with various disabilities.
  • Added experimental support of EPUB 3 (text-only as well as Media Overlays) by leveraging the new code base. We will be providing incremental releases for refining the EPUB 3 export.

Roadmap

The current test release comes with heavily refactored code base and incorporation of Pipeline 2, for providing a robust base for adding support for new accessible publishing formats. Consequently experimental support for EPUB 3 (text-only as well as Media Overlays) has been added in this release. At this time, DAISY 3, DAISY XML and DAISY 2.02 continue to be the primary formats produced by the add-in. We will be providing incremental releases for improving EPUB 3 export in 2022. Please keep a watch on this page for the updates.

Download and Installation

Before you install the add-in, please close all Office applications and uninstall previous versions of the add-in.
Download the latest version. To know about the improvements and new features, please visit the change log.
When you install the add-in, the “Save-as-DAISY Word Addin” folder is added to your Start menu with the Instruction Manual as well as a Getting Started tutorial.

Disclaimer: DAISY Translator makes use of LAME MP3 encoding technology. LAME provides the following notice on its site: “Using the LAME encoding engine (or other mp3 encoding technology) in your software may require a patent license in some countries.” We recommend you check out the information on the LAME MP3 Encoder SourceForge site.

Feedback channels and development repository

We are looking forward to the feedback for the test releases. Please contact us via the email: daisy-pipeline@mail.daisy.org or the GitHub issue tracker.
If you are interested in the development, please visit the GitHub repository.