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The DAISY Consortium created the first digital talking book (DTB) and this is now known worldwide as the DAISY format. The DAISY DTB is the application of existing worldwide standards used to define the next generation of information technology for people who are blind and print disabled. The acronym DAISY, digital audio‐based information system, is a name both for a reading system and for the consortium of libraries, non‐profit organizations and for‐profit Friends of the Consortium around the world that spearhead the development of the International standard. This article will briefly trace the history of DAISY’s development and go on to explain the current activities and future plans for the single worldwide standard.

This paper was written in response to the tendency for the international education literature to position the international teacher in essentialist and western-centric terms. The international school landscape has changed significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the rise of type C non-traditional international schools, which requires a reconceptualisation of the international teacher. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a Chinese English teacher (Daisy) in an internationalised school in Shanghai constructed her identity as an international teacher.

This paper drew upon concepts from the teacher identity literature in order to construct a comparative conceptual framework comprised of personal, professional and cross-cultural domains of experience. Commensurate with this framework, in-depth phenomenological interviewing and member-checking were utilised in order to gain access to the participant’s lived experiences. Member-checking and data analysis became a dialogic and recursive process in which rapport was continually maintained and strengthened through the sharing of raw and analysed data, with additional comments and suggestions being fed back into an emerging interpretation in order to generate more data and enhance validity.

The findings highlighted how Daisy was active in not only constructing her identity as an international educator but also mobilising this identity to challenge the western-centric nature of international education. The findings also revealed moments of discursive dissonance. Daisy simultaneously constructed an identity as an “internationalising” teacher, but was also constructed as an international teacher through a discourse that presented international education as constructivist, and therefore western-centric, in nature. Implications and recommendations are made for practice and research based on these findings.

This paper offers an alternative perspective on the international teacher experience, which continues to be western-centric in focus, by exploring the development of an international teacher identity from a Chinese perspective.

How can a worldwide training and technical support program be implemented to support the DAISY standard? The key to a successful implementation plan lies with building expertise throughout the consortium. This article explores the DAISY “Train the Trainers” courses, regional training centers, technical conferences, and the extensive technical support helpdesk the DAISY Consortium maintains. These activities are all intended to develop experts within every organization in the DAISY Consortium.

The Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind (RNZFB) currently lends talking books on audio cassette to blind and vision impaired New Zealanders. RNZFB belongs to the international consortium which has developed the DAISY digital talking book standard. Whereas analogue talking books are linear, DAISY books are structured so that the reader can navigate around the text with the facility of a sighted person looking through a printed document. DAISY books can also be multimedia productions that support more than one format. In progressing its use of digital reading technology, RNZFB will enhance the reading experience, decide how best to deliver book files, and form local and international partnerships to increase the range of reading material available to its members. The reading solutions adopted by RNZFB could become a model for the wider community of print disabled people.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse empirical studies regarding the use of digital talking books (Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) books) as well as the possibilities and limitations that users with print disabilities encounter when using these books. Upon fulfilment of this purpose, it is also possible to identify research needs in the area of talking books.

An analysis of 12 empirical studies concerning the use of DAISY books is conducted. The concept of affordances is employed in the analysis, which focuses on: users of talking books, talking books as objects, and the social settings in which talking books are used.

First, the reviewed literature indicates that the navigational features of the DAISY talking book appear to provide unprecedented affordances in terms of the users’ approaches to reading. However, the affordances of talking books depend, to some extent, on whether the users have visual impairments or dyslexia/reading and writing difficulties. Second, the reviewed literature illustrates that the affordances provided by talking books depend on the settings in which they are used, both in terms of specific social situations and wider socio-political contexts.

Although the need for assistive reading technologies, such as digital talking books, is large, research in this area is scarce, particularly from a user perspective. This paper describes the results of those studies which have actually been conducted on this topic and highlights areas that require further study.

The purpose of this paper is to build upon existing knowledge of personalisation through an improved understanding of how the use of personalised social care services can support older people’s sense of self. It contains perspectives that are helpful to the development of personalisation policy and practice and to the future commissioning of social care services.

The research involved a qualitative study with eight participants in two local authority areas in England. A series of three in-depth interviews conducted with each participant over a four to six week period explored their experience of using (in one case refusing) a direct payment to meet their social care needs. Ethical approval was obtained prior to the start of fieldwork via the research ethics committee of the author’s home university.

Two inter-related themes emerge as findings of the research. First, that the locus of personalisation resides within the interpersonal dynamics of helping relationships; participants experienced personalisation when carers helped to meet needs in ways that validated their narrative of self. Second, whilst the experience of personalisation is not strongly related to consumer choice, it is important that older people are able to exercise control over and within helping relationships.

This is a small scale qualitative study conducted with only eight participants. Whilst it offers valid insights into what constitutes personalisation and the processes by which it was achieved for the participants, caution is required in applying the findings more generally. With the exception of one case, the study is focused exclusively on first person accounts of older people. Future studies might usefully be designed to incorporate the accounts of other involved parties such as family members and paid carers.

The paper provides an alternative way of approaching personalisation of social care services for older people by exploring it in terms of its impact on self. It identifies the development of accommodations of “special requirements of Self” in helping relationships as a key mechanism of personalisation. This offers a balance to the current focus on consumer choice and control through the development of market like mechanisms.

A major advantage of storing accessible materials in a digital archive is that it facilitates large‐scale updates. Unfortunately, cataloguing these materials involves manual work and updates of the cataloguing records will not be made easily and quickly enough in the future. This paper aims to tackle these cataloguing problems and to inform about the latest developments and accomplishments in the field of accessible materials. The paper also stresses the importance of profiling cataloguing issues for libraries for the visually‐impaired within the cataloguing community.

The paper begins with an overview of the field of accessible materials and gives an account of certain cataloguing problems. Then follows a detailed description of these cataloguing issues before the paper concludes with a suggested method and a description of a practical workflow to counter the listed problems. The paper is, in a sense, a case study of a trend in the field of librarianship regarding technologies for the visually‐impaired.

The paper shows that a dynamic cataloguing solution is necessary to meet the growing number of dynamic digital materials for libraries that produce accessible materials.

Implementation of the suggested dynamic cataloguing solution results in less manual work while allowing large scale updates of a digital archive.

This paper provides some original perspectives on practical cataloguing challenges for libraries for the visually‐impaired.

As the first commercially available software for reading DAISY books on a PC, LpPlayer is an inexpensive vehicle for gaining access to the new format. For this review, several textbooks and standard literary works prepared by Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic were subjected to a broad series of searches and other study‐related tasks. Because of its ability to jump directly to a particular page or chapter beginning, LpPlayer will offer perfectly adequate DAISY access to the casual reader of novels or straightforward nonfiction.

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the spread of accessible e-books, especially ones of STEM much more in developing countries, an efficient/systematic scheme to localize tools for producing/reading them should be established. Furthermore, even in many advanced countries, Print-disabled people still do not have a good tool to write a content including technical notations such as mathematical formulas in their own local language. This work is aimed at giving a practical solution for those problems.

Here, multilingual support in a tool to produce accessible STEM contents and its new localization scheme are discussed.

It is shown that the accessible STEM-document editor can be customized easily for print-disabled people so that they can read and author a material including complicated technical notations in their own local language. The localization for Vietnamese and other various languages actually has been worked on.

The Vietnamese version was completed, and some prototype versions for the other languages were also given. It is expected that the software can contribute to improve STEM accessibility much more in many countries.

Consciousness of the need to backup hard disks has been rapidly rising, during the past year or two, among users of personal computers. That is probably the reason why there are now so many tape‐drive vendors competing for their attention.