Advisory Committee:
The call agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on January 23. There was one addition to the agenda from Jennifer to cover questions about the Requirements Gathering.
The next conference call is 2008 February 20, 0900 Eastern USA. Calls following this are scheduled for Mar 5, Mar 19, and April 2.
The FTF Meeting is confirmed for Tues-Thursday, April 15-17 in Palo Alto. With enough people confirmed, we can write a contract with the hotel. We could have a meeting room at the hotel or at Benetech/Bookshare. DAISY staff may schedule visits with local people outside of the FTF dates.
We have not yet sent out email announcements about dtbook-2005-3.dtd but it is posted on the site and is in the zip. George will contact Sonata about the new DTD. We will update the WCAG sample content before making a general announcement.
Jennifer is submitting comments and doing annotations as she reviews incoming requirements. 22 requirements were submitted and reviewed yesterday, primarily by the Mod Squad during their 2-day meeting. Requirements that are related are being noted. Areas to follow up on are SMIL, SVG, and NIMAS related requirements. Julien is designated to follow up on SVG; Boris suggested a post on the NIMAS list; Jennifer will forward an email to Boris about contacting organizations on the CAST list of conversion services.
Rather than attaching files to a requirement or a comment, it is suggested to post a link to what people want others to be able look at.
George reported that it was a good conference with lots of interest. Staff met face-to-face with many organizations, and heard from several sources about the need for better visual presentation. We've asked them to each submit the specific requirements directly since it is better coming from them.
Markus reported from their 2-day conference that they started with an approach that Julien has suggested. It is from a paper that he submitted at a conference recently. Julien will put together a white paper specifically for the Zed committee no later than late March, describing one approach of modularization which outlines how different specs, profiles and modules interact, etc. Thus the whole group should have about a month to read this, before the FTF, to give us a good start. James reviewed that the purpose of this white paper is to give a high level view of how these modules interact, plus include some real-life scenarios.
Boris asked about a suggestion from the London FTF meeting regarding an intermediate version, which would modularize the current version, while not including any major changes to it. It now sounds like we might skip that step and go for a big change and modularize that. James agreed that this seems to be the new direction.
Per George, the general feeling from ATIA meetings and other sources is that there is some urgency expected, mentioning 1) the idea of a container, i.e. a zip file that could pull things together; 2) the visual presentation issue, i.e. that the current presentation is rather flat and uncompelling. Lynn agreed, mentioning that in Ontario, where they are mandating DAISY as the official format, there is some negative reaction about the visual presentation for LD students. George echoed that continued demand for word-level synchronization is big, as well as the requirement for large-print. It was noted that TextHelp, Kurzweil, and the ClassMate are all doing word-level highlighting, which is rather easy with TTS. We need to figure out exactly what these requirements are, regarding better visual rendering.
Save-as-DAISY-Microsoft was announced by Microsoft on January 25, with another release scheduled at the end of February, and the final release in March. People at Microsoft, Reed Shaffner, etc, think this is a fantastic development, and support that where ever there is a print option, there should be a Save-as-DAISY option. George is approaching Save-as-DAISY with Adobe. Microsoft is preparing to really REALLY promote DAISY. They are cutting videos of DAISY users over next 3 weeks, translating into 12 languages and promoting it in each country around the world. They will be on the European continent trying to get radio and televison segments and pushing into major journals, same thing with North America, getting TV space and journal articles. There will be a major splash at CSUN this year. So the thrust of what Microsoft is doing is broad, general support of DAISY throughout the world, while being quite inclusive.
George noted for Diana, that people had met with Noel and Ron at ATIA, and announced to all that many of you may be contacted.
Boris asked if anyone had considered implementing Save-as-DAISY in Open Office. Time and attention from Open Office developers is needed. The implementation in the DAISY Pipeline needs improvement.
Kathy asked if the container issue is needed very soon for Save-as-DAISY. George agreed that it is, since people in the mainstream are not used to having to understand individual files. The IDPF has addressed this same thing, i.e. wrapping all the files in a zip file. Reed feels that this would really help adoption in the mainstream. There's nothing saying we couldn't do a modular extension to the Standard and get it in right now. This committee needs to think about the best thing we can be doing with all these requirements coming in. If there are things that are going to be quite problematic now, they should be addressed now.
Documentation on how to prepare a Word file for DAISY conversion is needed; Jennifer agreed that this impacts braille in DAISY, etc. George is asking Joel to check the template in the Pipeline and create a complete mapping, and from that, build whatever documentation we can re headings, styles, etc. George noted for Rob that Reed has been put in touch with Peter Osborne regarding photo shoots. Microsoft also wants to shoot in France, UK, and Netherlands. Lynn asked if George had talked with Reed about preparing the documentation for the Save-as-DAISY translator. The authoring guidelines document really needs to be improved; it should start with the template.
George summarized the work ahead: everyone wants everything in the Standard right now, but if everything is thrown in real quickly that's how it can get messed up.
Time: 9:00 – 10:00 EST
Venue: telcon
Conference Recording Filename: 20080206 (call the DAISY Conference number and enter *3 for playback)
Scribe: Kathy Kahl
Last Edited: 2008 February 15
Status: Version 1 reviewed by GK