Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Tom McLaughlin – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Michael Moodie – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Ole Holst Andersen – Danish Library for the Blind
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Dave Pawson – Royal National Institute of the Blind

Participating Experts:

• Werner Krebs – Design Science
• Chris Wilder-Smith – CAST
• Neil Soiffer – Design Science

Apologies:

• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – Danish Library for the Blind
• Dominic Labbé – VisuAide
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic

Agenda

The agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee's list on March 1, 2005. there were no amendments in advance of the call.

There were no additions to the proposed agenda.

3. Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

Gk reminded the committee that the next call be held on April 6, 2005.

SMIL Working Group Report

Note: Marisa provided this written report of the oral report provided on the call.

SMIL F2F Summary

February 28 - March 1, 2005
Boston, USA

Attendees from DAISY:

• Markku Hakkinen
• Marisa DeMeglio

This report prepared by Marisa.

Overview

The working group spent approximately one day brainstorming for SMIL version-next and preparing the requirements skeleton. Other agenda items were to respond to comments about SMIL 2.1 and plan the next F2F.

Some potential goals for SMIL 3 (as given by the group)

• Improving the accessibility of SMIL presentations.
• Transparent forms of authoring (content customization and personalization, improving interaction by adding state, useful for games).
  • MM presentation blog, where several people contribute to the same document.
• Adding higher level temporal constructs for ease of authoring

Discussion points relevant to DAISY

• Text element as a fragment of an XML document
• Logical navigation points (example: chapters, phrases)
• Accessible labeling (accessible information about all choices in a SMIL presentation.)
• Multi-document presentations
  • auto-fire anchor (actuate="onLoad")
  • HTML link element to chain documents
• AccessKey issue
  • XHTML2 defines logical names for parts of a doc that the author considers important to be able to jump to directly.
  • Action item: Marisa and Markku look further into the XHTML2 mechanism and if it could be useful at least in the DAISY context.
• 4-way Navigation
  • there is a CSS3 mechanism for 4-way navigation: navDown, navUp, .......
  • This has some issues and needs further exploration

Notes on SMIL and DAISY

In general, our requirements for SMIL features fall into the following categories:

• Navigation (Invocation, Semantic data, Context, Presentation of options)
• Text handling (Highlight a fragment within a whole document/screen)
• Accessible labels (Each choice/navigable area must be labelled accessibly: custom test, region, any navigation target)
• Multi-document presentations (Chain SMIL files together)
• TTS rendering (Introduces the idea of multiple renders for one media object)
• User agent recommendations
• Authoring guidelines
• DTB profile

Comments

• The group is responsive to accessibility needs.
• Concrete examples and the corresponding specific requirements are being prepared by Markku and Marisa.
• The official SMIL version-next requirements document will begin soon.

Note: Mark Hakkinen is the editor for the requirements of SMIL next.

API Development

George provided a report of discussions with Hiroshi in Geneva and the DAISY Board in Hamburg.

There are a number of developments in the SMIL world. AMI may join with Ambulent player (CWI smil player)., Hiroshi has hired Daniel Wick, the programmer working on the Limsee2 authoring tool from INRIA. There are opportunities for collaboration between the DAISY/NISO community and the mainstream.

Hiroshi is proposing a meeting in Japan for the experts from DAISY and the mainstream for some time in May. There was a long discussion of possible dates.

2005 Version status

Michael informed the committee earlier that the 2005 specification passed NISO. It is now with ANSI for approval. This is normally a fast process.

Michael has a number of action items associated with the specification now that it is approved.

• Distribute the revised DTDS, due mid March.
• Make revisions to the specification noting the difference between 2004 and 2005 in text.
• Michael will respond to the two comments.
• It will go to NISO for a grammatical review.
• Once these are finished, it will be published by NISO.