Alternative Applications

by George Kerscher

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Abstract

The DAISY Standard is being adopted worldwide by organizations serving persons who are blind and print disabled. Now, the mainstream of society is beginning to look seriously at DAISY standards for a variety of applications. Here we will consider some of the new applications of DAISY and the opportunities for research and development.

Web Based Virtual Tours, With Presentations on Site

I want you to think about all the great museums, art galleries, zoos, game preserves, aquariums, historical buildings, national monuments, and national parks around the world. We have read about these in books, and if you are lucky, you may visit in person. Now let's think about the best ways to present the individual attractions on the Web, and at the same time, prepare the presentations for use at the physical location of the exhibit.

Clearly, this is a multimedia application. On the Web we want to showcase the attraction and drive people to the Web site. The goals are to encourage people to physically go to the attraction, or to virtually go there through the Web. The Web site can provide a flavor of the physical attraction, or it can provide an ever growing amount of detail.

Why DAISY?

• DAISY provides a rich multimedia experience;
• The DAISY navigation model can be used effectively online or at the physical site;
• The message can reach a wide audience, because it incorporates both sight and hearing;
• The same content is synchronized in multiple modalities.

EXAMPLE: Field Museum, Lion Exhibit

The Field Museum of History in Chicago is one of the great attractions in the city. I recall visiting the museum as a child. One of the first exhibits there is the "Man Eating Lion Exhibit." They have recreated a scene in Africa and show two stuffed lions. Actually these are the same lions that, as legend says, killed hundreds of people during the building of railroads through the region in the early 1900's. You might have seen the movie "Ghost in the Darkness," which dramatizes what happened and how these two lions were eventually killed.

Note you can Google "Field Museum +lion +man +eating" and get good results.

In addition to the exhibit, provide more:

• Instead of a poster that tells the story on one page, include the multimedia presentation from the Web site;
• Include film snips from the movie;
• Provide walking tours where the audio content from the Web site can be presented -- This is identical to the audio of the exhibit, but people can look at the exhibit instead of a computer scene;
• Your exhibit can go on to explain what is being done to protect the lions in the wild today;

Research and Development opportunities in this space

The technology that is needed is the direct navigation to a particular exhibit. In the DAISY standard, you can go directly to a page by typing in a page number, but while this would be one way to incorporate DAISY navigation, there are better approaches.

Add RFID to the DAISY Navigation

RFID, as you may know, allows the passive broadcast of an identifier of an object. They can be put on many different products. Think about placing an RFID on the exhibit at the museum. As you move from exhibit to exhibit the unique RFID would identify the exhibit. This could trigger the DAISY device to navigate to that segment of content and begin playing.

Add GPS to the DAISY Navigation

For national parks or any outside area, use GPS to trigger the navigation to a particular presentation. Audio provided for automobiles is very difficult to use, because there is no navigation model. Use the GPS to get you to the right chunk of information about where you are.

Note: VisuAide (now HumanWare) produced a product called "City Go" that provided a tour of Paris. It used the DAISY concept along with GPS. I believe this is no longer a product. I think it was a product before its time.

Features of the Walking Tour

• You are using non-proprietary open standards, and not an expensive proprietary system.
• The basic features of speed up, slow down, reverse and forward can be used to navigate through the section of the presentation.
• The same content can be used on the museum's Web site to promote visiting their facility.
• A synchronized multimedia tour of the museum could be developed that could be used to bring more people to visit.
• A virtual tour of the museum could be developed and made available on the Web site.
• The content prepared for the Web site could be identical to what is used on the devices at the museum.

Mainstream Audio Publishing

Audio publishers, one would think, would be the first of the mainstream technologies to embrace the DAISY standards. However, this has not been the case. Primarily, the automobile commuter is their primary market, and they traditionally only publish audio novels. Playback in the car has been the focus of their interests. They have also followed the music industry, because they want to reach the largest market possible.

The Primary development needed in this area is:

• Automobile audio entertainment systems need to support DAISY playback;
• Mobile audio (MP3/I-Tunes) needs to support DAISY and integrate it into the car systems;
• Downloadable audio must become more common and the time of download needs to be addressed;

Note: I have purchased an FM transmitter. This plugs into the headphone jack of a playback system and broadcasts an FM signal which can be picked up by the car's radio. The sound quality was not very good in my opinion.

Recording Conferences

The DAISY Consortium has recorded all of our major conferences. This is an opportunity for a company to bring DAISY technology to every conference. All the technology one needs is already here; nothing to develop, except the marketing.

Archiving Old Audio Content

Every organization that has large collections of audio content have a problem on their hands. The problems are:

1. Digitizing any analog materials they still have;
2. Cataloging their materials;
3. Navigating the audio they have;
4. Distributing the content to qualified people;

This points to service providers who can help these organizations with audio collections solve their problems by using the DAISY standards.

Health Information

Health information needs to be available to all. In many parts of the world, those people who need the information the most cannot read. Our health information systems must be able to accommodate these groups. I look at this in two categories:

Epidemic and Disease Control

Aides, for example, is a public health danger and has reached pandemic proportions. How do we get the information to the people? Printed brochures will not work. What is best to reach the masses of people in developing countries and throughout the world? I believe it must be a multimedia presentation that works for everybody. There are issues with how this technology can be implemented in communities without electricity or an infrastructure to support technology. This is an area for research and development.

Note: Consider the development of multimedia presentations through cell phones.

Medical Research and Public Health Information

The first step in making all health information accessible is in the design of the information itself. This should be through open non-proprietary information systems. XML is the right technology for this. The DAISY standards describe an XML vocabulary, but it is limited in what it can do today. The DAISY Consortium is extending the current elements we support, but more importantly, we hope to support all logical XML vocabularies in the future. This means that all publishing systems, including those optimized for health information could be used within the DAISY multimedia and navigation model. This is research and development we are targeting for the next several years.

Language Preservation

1. Many languages have no written script; they exist through an oral tradition. There are thousands of these languages throughout the world, and they are endangered.
2. The DAISY standard enables audio content to be synchronized with image and text elements. This strong audio influence can be used in language preservation. Spoken language can be recorded and then associated with a textual translation and/or image.

Research and Development Opportunity

This area is wide open for R&D. However, time is critical. In North America, the Native Americans have more than 400 languages. The elders who speak these languages are dyeing. They want to preserve this rich language heritage for future generations, but unless a mechanism is developed, these languages will be lost. There are similar situations throughout the world.

Foreign Language Training

This is an obvious area for development. Some of the items to explore are:

• Word level audio and text synchronization.
• How do we do dictionary look-ups? The word meanings in context are very different. Especially interesting are popular expressions.
• How do we represent one page in one language, and the facing page in another language?
• How can we look up expressions?

Print Publishers — The Print Paradigm

The whole area of the established print publishing industry is very interesting in this digital age. Publishers want to move into digital publishing, but the sales and market model is hard to figure out. There are also concerns about illegal copying of digital content. However, from the technological perspective, the DAISY standard is very interesting.

Multimedia and Distance Learning — Digital Publishing

New publishing techniques are evolving. Higher education and adult education courses are being designed for the Web. Courseware, online books, and self-paced testing make up just a part of this domain. Unfortunately, the current design of many of these information components is not designed to be accessible by everybody. The DAISY standards are perfect for many of these applications.

Note: there are areas where the DAISY standard needs enhancements. Testing is one of these components that is ready for innovation and development.

Emergency Preparedness Training and Early Warning Broadcasting

In the past year the world has suffered many disasters. The Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and now the earthquake in Pakistan. Information technology will play a central role in preparing our society for future emergency situations, and it will be essential in the warning systems we design. These systems must be accessible to every person in our society, including persons with disabilities.

Why synchronized multimedia? Because:

• The information can be designed so that many different sensory approaches are used to communicate the information;
• The multimedia reaches the widest number of people;
• The distribution system can take advantage of the multimedia characteristics;
• The text can go out over cell phones as text messaging;
• The audio can be broadcast by the radio;
• Video can be broadcast over the television;
• It is all available on the Web, because Internet standards are at the heart of the technology.

This area of research and development has one other aspect. If we do not advocate for accessible emergency preparedness systems, persons with disabilities will be left out of the design. Our emergency systems must take care of everybody in the society.