Tobi

Tobi is an authoring tool for DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) standard of talking books. The DAISY standard helps people suffering from blindness, dyslexia, and impaired vision listen to digital audiobooks and periodicals.

The graphical user interface has the basic functionality of a document reader. It relies on importing documents in XUK, OBI, and XUKSPINE that can be acquired from DAISY's official website marketplace.

From there users can download their desired books and listen to them straight from the computer. Low-vision users enjoy high-quality scalable vector graphics with magnification for touch-screen, together with a fully accessible keyboard at their disposal with customized shortcuts.

To help impaired users discern graphical features better, Tobi also supports Windows high-contrast color schemes. Changes can be redone and undone reliably, and pages can be navigated via headings and numbers. Errors that were introduced during the writing of the text are automatically corrected by Tobi's dedicated metadata editor.

Tobi supports Digital Talking Books using the ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 standard and DAISY 3 / DTBook XML as basis, together with MathML-in-DAISY for embedded mathematical equations and formulas.

Audio-wise, Tobi can support MP3, uncompressed WAV (decoding and encoding), and MP4-AAC (decoding). This way, visually impaired users will have all the technological aid they need to enjoy books without actually having to read them. Tobi also allows users to edit audio WAV files by modifying fragments on the timeline, and increasing their pitch and playback.

However, Tobi cannot edit and write any DAISY-compatible documents. Users must use Save-AS-DAISY add-ons for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer if they plan to write and then test documents written by them in Tobi.

Tobi is a powerful and flexible solution for visually impaired individuals that allows them to enjoy books, literature, and most digitally written documents in special DAISY supported formats.

The app comes with excellent support for most external third-party writing applications, and users can easily convert normal XML files to DAISY specific ones. This way, visually impaired people can enjoy the world's entire literature and knowledge with no hassle or difficulties.