This is a very exciting development, in my opinion. I do like to read magazines from time to time, but the ones that CELA offered frankly don’t interest me (apart from L’Actualité and, sometimes, MacLean’s magazine). The new offerings include WIRED magazine, though, which makes me really happy.

What is a DAISY book?

In case you don’t know, DAISY is an accessible format that allows visually-impaired people to navigate books, create bookmarks, and generally use a book the way a sighted person would, only by listening.

DAISY is an international encoding standard which, hopefully, will one day merge with the new EPUB3 standard. If this happens – and the industry actually adopts that standard, another long story – then books will become accessible by default at the time of publication (a huge social-justice coup).

Until then, the DAISY Consortium makes tools available. It’s currently very difficult to make a DAISY book (but SO worth it from a visually-impaired reader’s point of view!). Trying to make one is one of the many things I have been frustrating myself with periodically in the past few years.

Books can be read by the computer (you have to develop an ear for this, it’s very confusing with homonyms, acronyms and words is doesn’t recognise being pronounced any old how) or they can be read out loud by actual people. This second type is much nicer to listen to, but also takes a lot longer to produce! It’s excellent for novels, short stories or any kind of fiction and the CNIB volunteers who read them are really heroes in my book.

CELA has English and French volunteer-read books made by CNIB volunteers, but it also offers RNIB (UK), French and Australian readers. They recently made an agreement with Blackstone Audio, as well, I believe. Most of the books I review on this site are of the second variety.

How to find the new magazines

To find CELA’s new DAISY text magazines, log in and select Newsstand. It is the second option on the Quick Links menu. This new offering greatly expands the number of accessible magazine title, and includes things like Wired magazine and The New Yorker.

According to the website: > “CELA, together with RB Digital, is launching Canada’s first DAISY magazine service to make some of today’s most popular magazines available in a wide range of formats as soon as they are published.

The growing collection will include numerous popular titles covering news and business, decorating and cooking, sports and health, hobbies and popular culture as well as teen’s, children’s and women’s magazines. By the end of 2017 CELA patrons will have access to more than 100 magazines.“

Currently (near the end of March, 2017), there are 10 English-language magazines available:

  • Better Homes and Gardens
  • Canadian Living
  • The Economist
  • The Hockey News
  • The New Yorker
  • Newsweek
  • Prevention
  • Seventeen
  • WIRED
  • Zoomer Magazine
There are 5 new French-language magazines:
  • Les Affaires
  • Coup de Pouce
  • Elle Québec
  • L’Express
  • Paris Match

All the original audio magazines are still available, as well. Whereas the new magazines described above are read by a computer voice (text-to-speech or TTS), these are read by volunteers in a human voice. The audio magazine titles include MacLean’s, Canadian Geographic, Chatelaine, Good Times and Reader’s Digest in English, and l’Actualité, Bel Âge, Sélection du Reader’s Digest in French. There are also titles in Mandarin, Polish and Italian.

How to download and read them

To use these new magazines:

  1. Download the ZIP file to your computer and unzip it.
  2. Transfer it to your DAISY player by copying and pasting it to your SD card. Some players have a USB port, so you can use a USB key, too. It works on PlexTalk and Victor Readers, they say (although I have not yet tried it).
    OR
    Open it in the AMIS reader from your hard-drive. To do this, navigate to the folder into which you unzipped it, and select the ncc.html file (AMIS is a free and open-source DAISY reader from the DAISY Consortium.) This, I have tried and it works very well!
I have not figured out a way to use the Direct to Player option, so I think you really do need to do it the old-fashioned way: copy to card, don’t forget to eject! That is a bit of a shame. I have sort of become addicted to the ease of use of the direct wireless downloads. There are some other apps that they say you can use, as well. I object quite strongly to Apple’s Walled Garden approach to the Internet, so I avoid all of the iDevices when I can. Unfortunately, the blind community favours them, and there really are a lot of accessibility features built in. The price of an iDevice is hard to justify, though: the next one will cost over a thousand dollars, and the company deprecates its stuff so soon that it basically forces you to buy a new one at a regular interval.

Wait. I digress. There are also a number of apps that you can use on Android and IOS, on your PC desktop or laptop, according to the website tutorials. Only, the Capti Reader is not available for Android (despite what the CELA site claims, it’s “coming soon”). I could not get it to work on my PC, either, since it uses Flash-based interface, of which many firewalls are suspicious (for good reason). Also, most functions are only available in the Premium (paid) version, including images and different playlists, etc.

The new magazines don’t seem to work on any of the apps I currently use.

  1. There is an Android app called Direct to Player, which was created specifically to allow you to stream CELA books to your Android device. I tried for about an hour or so, but could not get it to recognise the DAISY text magazines. However, I do use this app quite a bit for the book content, and it works well.
  2. I use a similar app for Bookshare content Go Read by Benetech, which I love for my professional or other non-fiction reading. Unfortunately, Go Read does not seem to work, either.
  3. For Bookshare books, I mostly use the in-browser reader, though, because I read at lunch and my workplace will not allow me to install AMIS, my preferred desktop DAISY-reading tool.

Problems

One problem that I did experience (and I’m not sure why): I downloaded the French AMIS language pack, and installed it. You have to restart, but that all went fine and the program came back up in French (yay) and could read its own help manual in French.

What I could not get it to do, however, was to read the French magazine (Coup de pouce, avril 2017). I went back and tried with Les affaires : 4 mars 2017. Same issue: The Play button becomes the Pause button, and there is no way to unpause it!

Now, I’m not sure if that is a CELA or an AMIS issue, but I supect it’s a CELA thing, since the Play button re-enables as soon as I close the French-language CELA DAISY book. Annoying. And, it means that I can’t review the French DAISY text magazines. Quel dommage.

I’d be interested to hear if others have the same problem?

Update: March 23, 2016 – App that will read the mazagines on Android

I was able to hear the downloaded magazine using a DAISY Book Reader app from the Google Play store. It amazed me, really: I didn’t even try it – it just worked! I installed the app and it automatically recognised the magazines and started reading them! UNfortunately, it wouldn’t STOP reading them. I had to turn off the device! But that’s better than not being able to read them at all. They also have a non-advertising version for about 5 dollars. I don’t know if that one will stop or not (grin).

Update: March 26, 2016 – More titles released (and still more scheduled)

As of today (March 26), there are currently 24 DAISY text magazines in English and 6 (1 more) in French. According to CELA, many more titles will be added. This is hugely exciting (to me, at least)! Certainly, something to keep your eye on.

Also, THERE IS NO TIME DELAY! April Wired was available yesterday! This is wonderful, as delays are often the norm for accessible publications.