The Advisory Committee for the DAISY/NISO Standard, formally the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book, met in Copenhagen February 7-9 2007. This was the first face-to-face meeting since the Spring of 2004. The committee has been meeting monthly to address primarily maintenance issues. This face-to-face meeting was called to analyze the current state of the standard, it's relation to other standards and technological developments, and to consider if the standard required revision.
We would like to gratefully thank the organizations who made these experts available to attend this meeting. We would also like to thank DBB for providing their facilities for the meeting; Anita Schoenbaum, from DBB, was instrumental in making the various arrangements. Finally we would like to thank the experts for all of their hard work. Without this contribution, the standard could not survive.
The Zed committee, as it has become known, took a high level approach to the analysis that needed to be conducted. All aspects of the standard, its strengths and weaknesses, the user experience, including the cost of playback systems, and production of audio and text content were considered. It was an open and honest series of discussions and debates, in a professional and constructive environment.
DAISY 2.02, with audio plus the navigation center has enjoyed huge success that surpasses any assistive technology used in the blindness field. It is estimated that 100,000 screen readers are in use worldwide. There are at least double or triple that number of DAISY hardware players that have been sold. Include the software players, and the number of people who are using MP3 players (inferior, but still usable) to read DAISY content, it is clear that we have a widely adopted standard that is entrenched in the blindness community and in libraries serving persons with disabilities.
From a technical perspective, The DAISY/NISO 2005 Standard is clearly superior but there has been a lack of adoption. There is a lack of authoring tools and support in reading systems. Also, the benefits would need to be extremely significant for organizations to bear the costs of upgrading. Upgrading includes not only the player upgrades, but the support to the end users, the content upgrades, and the internal systems needed in the transition process.
With the majority of content in the DAISY world being audio plus navigation, the benefits of upgrading to the DAISY/NISO Standard are just not there. When an organization starts to focus on text, then the benefits of the XML in the Zed standard are extremely clear. It has been noted that organizations, like DBB, will author exclusively in Zed, but then downgrade to DAISY 2.02 for distribution, because of the support in players; they keep their collection in the Zed standard. Organizations who have a text focus use the Zed standard at the center of their production process.
Player manufacturers recognize that the DAISY Standards, even 2.02 are complex. This requires more hardware resources to be available. It also requires more software development. Simple MP3 players have dedicated chips for MP3 playback and do not require much additional hardware resources for playing music or the consecutive playback of pages or chapters; their reading experience is also not as good. So there is a trade off between the cost of players and their capabilities. It was observed that DAISY like capabilities could be provided by a play list approach, but there are many of these specifications and no clear leader. Also, most of these are geared towards music, and not the reading of publications.
Persons with dyslexia and other reading issues are not well served by the current implementations. Images for example can be supported inline, but not fixed in a SMIL region; the Zed specification does not define layout regions, which the larger SMIL spec does. Persons who can see want a good visual experience. Some have attempted to do this, but under the current spec it is unclear on how best to do this.
Consider three categories of content: one that is primarily audio, one that is text, and one that is audio synchronized with text and images. Let's call these content profiles. If we took the existing Zed specification and broke it into modules, these three types of content profiles could be created from the modules.
An audio profile could be created that provides the same functionality that we have in the rich Zed specification. However, in addition to the pure Zed approach that uses SMIL, a series of fallbacks could be defined that enables a player or reading system to pick the one they understand. A fallback could be defined that does not require SMIL processing, but still enables hierarchical and page navigation. Other fallbacks could include the existing competing specifications for reading audio boo markup-like content. All of the formats could exist on a single media, like CD-ROM, or it could be downloaded for online distribution. All the fallback files can be generated by the rich Zed formatted content. Online delivery would also allow content negotiation so that only the files needed for the end users' player or reading system would be delivered.
A fly weight or feather weight player could be used to play this content. It would not necessarily use the full richness of the Zed formatted content, but it would still work effectively. A more powerful player would select the highest level specification to provide a full featured reading experience. This also addresses the difficult issue of extremely complex books. If a player does not have enough resources to process something like a TV listings or a train schedule, it could use the fallback mechanisms and not fail or take too long to respond. Of course, this approach is designed to have players and reading systems with different price points and competing feature sets.
A text profile could also be defined that does not require the use of SMIL. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is already building a spec that is modular and is looking to adopt the NCX and dtbook (the text for Zed content). It would be much easier for everybody involved if the various components of the existing Zed specification were modularized and abstracted for more general use.
The SMIL working group, operating under the W3C, has been developing a DAISY multimedia profile that we can use. This would support the development of a full text and audio profile.
In addition, the modularization of the specification would allow us to resolve problems that we have today; we could:
A lengthy discussion developed that came to the conclusion that there are essentially two development tracks:
NISO has undergone a complete administration change, including a new president and administrative staff. George has had a conference call with the new president Todd Carpenter and primary contact Karen Wetzel. They have our letter and their Board decision making the DAISY Consortium the maintenance agency for the Z39.86 Standard, but they would like to work with us to revise the agreement and bring the operations of the committee into alignment with their new policies and procedures. Regarding the development of the MathML extension, they expressed concern that this was not publicized to NISO membership. They want it to be open, transparent, and moved into the mainstream. All of these criteria provide excellent opportunities for advancing the standard. It also is a perfect opportunity to start the next spec development under the new administration. A lengthy discussion followed which is reflected in the action items.
Last revised: 14 March 2007
Status: draft 3