The Benetech DIAGRAM Center has released an open source web application for creating and editing crowd-sourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities.
The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM makes otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers with disabilities. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will also be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format.
Poet allows users to upload a digital book, review and navigate to images in the text, and add image descriptions that assist readers with print disabilities such as vision impairments.
To add image descriptions to a DAISY book, a teacher or other user of digital texts could visit a website that is hosting Poet, such as poet.diagramcenter.org and upload a book from their school server or select a book that has already been uploaded. The teacher could then add alternate image descriptions and download the book again when they are done. Any ebook in the DAISY 3 format can be submitted for image descriptions and read by DAISY compatible software that supports image description playback. Information about devices that support image descriptions can be found at the DIAGRAM website.
