I wrote up what I knew in September last year regardding this. In short, Emerson is the player I would put my effort behind at this point. Its author, Markus Gilling, is the project lead for the daisy standards development project. Emerson runs in a gui and can be used with orca. According to Markus, modifying Emerson to have a text-only mode should be relatively easy. Below is an extract from the document I wrote last September. Kind regards, Willem A look at, and comparison of the currently available open-source Daisy players The following programs will be discussed. Amis, Daisy-delite, DBR, Emerson, Idair, Listen-up. All these programs are free of cost and open-source which both are big advantages. 1. Amis: Strong points: Amis, a Daisy Consortium supported project, Is well maintained and development continue to keep it current with the evolving daisy standard. AMIS 3.0 was released May 5, 2009, see: http://daisy-trac.cvsdude.com/amis/wiki/WikiStart#CurrentStatus and AMIS 3.1 is being worked on. Amis Supports daisy standards reasonably well, including support for DAISY 3. This DAISY player is working and being used by a large number of users of different nationalities, under Windows. It is most likely the open-source Daisy player that had the most real-world testing of those discussed here. Amis, which is a self-voicing applichation, supports multi-lingual use well. The audio prompts are provided using human-recorded voice, there by providing a very clear sounding interface to the user. By using the Ambulant back-end, AMIS supports multiple audio formats and could potentially support video using this back-end. Week points: Although open-source, porting to other platforms than Windows is impractical if not impossible. It should how ever be possible to port the core library, but more work is needed before this will become a reality. The very bulky back-end, (Ambulant), used by AMIS, although very flexable, is not strait forward to build on any platform. 2. Daisy delite. Strong points: DaisyDelight, originally written for the Apple Mackentosh, is easy to port among different platforms since it mainly uses very standard Python, a language available on most important platforms. Getting it to work under Linux required minimal changes during experimentation. This player has a well-defined separation between the engine and the user interface. The design lends it to be repackaged as a python Daisy module for the engine part, leaving many options for different user interfaces. Week points: DaisyDelight does not support important components of the Daisy standard like full-text synchronization. In its current state, DaisyDelight Does not work for any but very simple daisy 2.02 books. It is no longer actively developed or maintained. After finding the project web site, http://neppord.is-a-geek.com/projects/daisyDelight/trac/, unavailable in early January 2009, the author of DaisyDelight was contacted and responded on the 9th of January 2009 that the site was down and since there was no activity for a while, getting it back up again was not a priority. When checked on 14 September 2009, it was still down. It only supports .mp3 as audio format, although changing this to include others should be not too difficult. 3. DBR: Strong points: DBR should be reasonably easy to port among python-supported platforms as it uses well-maintained, widely used libraries like gstreamer and gtk. It is still maintained/developed, Last entries in the Changelog is on 18 March 2009 and the current development version is DBR 0.1.2. It is available through subversion at: https://dbr.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dbr/trunk Its authors intend DBR to have good daisy standard support in the future. It already is capable of playing daisy 2.02 books in a usable way. Week points: The standard version only supports .mp3 audio, but a modification to make it support most audio formats had been made During experimentation. It does not support full-text/full-audio synchronization, but adding such support is not precluded by the current design. It does not support more complex navigation among levels well. It currently uses a rather naive blunt-instrument approach to parsing the daisy book. Emerson: Strong points: It is written in Java, known to be a portable language. Emerson was planned from the start to support the Daisy standards well on different platforms. It already supports playing of Daisy 2.02 books better than all others except Amis. Week points: Very early development with one developer who only can spend limited time on the project. Likely due to this fact, documentation is very limited and the building process is not yet stream-lined Emerson currently is at version 0.6.2 and the last activity is on the 29th of May 2009, (checked on 15 September 2009). See: http://code.google.com/p/emerson-reader/ . It still has a long way to go before it would support all of its rather impressive feature set. One critical missing feature of which the addition would make it a lot more usable, is the ability to switch levels in a daisy book. Idair: Strong points: Idair is a text-only daisy player with the choice of a tcl gui. It works reasonably well and has full-text/full-audio synchronization. Week points: Idair does not fully support daisy 2.02 although it works with most books. Idair is no longer being maintained and the author is not interested in the project any longer. Last release 0.8.3, was on 18 December 2003. See http://idair.sourceforge.net/ On 5 May 2005, the author said: "It's obsolete, please look at the amis project instead. Regards, Johan". Around mid-September 2005 there were a number of people on the Daisy Technical development list, discussing the merrits of this player and requests were made to the author to revive the project, which he said he would considder. There might still be some merrit in reviving it, even today. It does not compile under more modern Unixes. The main focus were to get Idair to work well under UNIX only, but there is a Windows version and an OSX one too. It only supports .mp3 audio. Listen-up: Listen-up is available from http://linux-speakup.org/listenup.html and was built to be a full-featured daisy player. Strong points: it supports most audio file formats It supports full-text/full-audio synchronization. Week points: Listen-up was built to run on Linux,but it might be ported to other platforms if another audio library is used. It was built to be text-only, so would not be suited for none blind Daisy users who need images and video. Listen-up has not been maintained for a very long time. The last changelog entry was made on 2003-09-17. It therefore did not keep up with the evolving daisy standards. -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support.
