Why so bad? The problem is that for the blind, the most important parts of a page are the parts even the sighted can't perceive -- invisible metadata embedded in the document. What's missed isn't the stylistic metadata that sighted users usually think about, such as font, size, or color, but attributes such as paragraph marks, table structures, and headings, which determine a document's actual structure.
Good structural metadata lets a blind user nimbly navigate, browse and search a document. Word and PDF weren't built from the ground up to support that. DAISY was.
"DAISY is a fantastic format due to its flexibility," said Sam Ogami, an assistive-technology expert for the California State University system's chancellor's office. "From DAISY, you can easily move to other accessible formats, such as Braille or large print, in addition to audio, with little to no extra work."
