DAISY Consortium

The DAISY Consortium is a global consortium of organizations committed to the common vision of ensuring that that information and knowledge is accessible to all. The Consortium's mission is to develop global solutions for accessible publishing and reading. (See the DAISY Consortium's Vision and Mission for more information.)

The DAISY Consortium has played a key role in the development of EPUB — not only in the authoring of the standard itself, but also in the development of major projects such as the epubcheck validation tool, the Ace accessibility checker, reading system accessibility reviews, and development of best practices.

DAISY Digital Talking Books
DAISY Format

The DAISY Consortium was originally formed to develop a talking book standard for readers with print disabilities. Two versions of the format, DAISY 2 (built on XHTML and SMIL) and DAISY 3 (built on a custom XML grammar and SMIL), are still widely produced.

The DAISY Consortium no longer develops a separate talking book standard as EPUB 3 includes accessibility features that allow authors to create a single format that can be accessible to a wide range of user needs. EPUB 3 is considered the successor format to DAISY 3.

DIAGRAM

The Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials (DIAGRAM) project was originally undertaken to make image and graphic content more accessible by defining a content model for writing descriptions and including alternate representations.

The mandate of the project has since been increased and the DIAGRAM Centre now provides tutorials and best practices not only for producing accessible image content but also for math content and for accessible publishing in general.

Digital Publication

The term digital publication is used to refer to a publication in a digital format without having to refer to a specific format.

Using the term digital publication avoids the baggage of content-specific names, like "ebook". Publications are not just books, but magazines, comics, audiobooks, articles, business documents or anything else that can be published digitally.

Document Object Model

The document object model, or DOM, is the structure produced when a user agent (e.g., a reading system or browser) processes the markup in a web document. The DOM is typically likened to a tree of branches, where each branch represents the parent/child relationships of all the elements in the source document.

The DOM is what allows scripts to operate on web documents — to change the styles of elements, to add or remove content, etc. — as the information about the document is stored in an abstract and language-independent way.

For more information about the DOM, refer to the MDN article Introduction to the DOM.