For Immediate Release

MathDaisy 1.0 is Now Shipping

Microsoft Word users can now create documents with accessible math

LONG BEACH, Calif. — April 13, 2009 — Design Science today announced the release of MathDaisy™ 1.0. MathDaisy enhances Microsoft's Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word to convert Word documents containing math notation to DAISY Digital Talking Books, ready to be read by students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with vision and learning disabilities, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia.

Save As DAISY is open source software developed by Microsoft. Once installed, it adds a "Save As Daisy" command to Microsoft Word XP, 2003, and 2007 that converts Word documents into DAISY's Digital Talking Book format. MathDaisy installs into Save As Daisy to support math conversion.

Increasingly, educators and publishers are being required to accommodate their students with special needs by providing content in the DAISY Book format. Students then use DAISY player software, dedicated eBook readers, and other portable devices to read the DAISY Book. "DAISY Books are the format of choice for accessible content. Now that Save As DAISY makes it possible for educators to make their own accessible content, DAISY will really take off. We were happy to work with the DAISY Consortium and Microsoft to make this happen," said Paul R. Topping, President & CEO of Design Science.

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) is a globally recognized XML standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents, including Digital Talking Books (DTBook), digital textbooks, and synchronized audio/text books. DAISY is used by NIMAS (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) for accessible K-12 textbooks and by ePub, a widely used standard for digital books. The latest version of the DAISY standard requires that mathematics be represented in MathML, the World Wide Web Consortium's standard for representing math notation in XML.

Save as DAISY with MathDaisy works well for teachers and professors that must accommodate their students' needs. However, organizations with their own publishing workflow, or those wanting to create a more automated or more powerful DAISY production facility, should also be interested in Design Science's MathFlow line of products.

MathDaisy is US $97 for academic users, $179 for non-academic users. Anyone can download MathDaisy from the Design Science website and try it free for 30 days.

About Design Science

Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Long Beach, California, Design Science develops software used by educators, scientists and publishing professionals, including MathType, Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, MathDaisy, MathFlow, MathPlayer and WebEQ, to communicate on the web and in print. For more information please visit www.dessci.com.

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