ZedDist Video Manifesto
From zedwiki
This "Manifesto" highlights the overarching rationale and strategy behind the 'video-in-DAISY' standardization activity, which is currently in its inception phase. Some points in this document apply to the revision of the DAISY standard as a whole, so they may also be taken into consideration by other working groups.
Note: this document is attached to the main 'video-in-DAISY' wiki page: see ZedDist_Video.
Contents |
Background
DAISY is more than just a technology: it is an established brand which promotes access to digital information for people with all kinds of abilities. "The Best Way to Read, The Best Way to Publish".
The traditional document model associated with DAISY publications is geared towards emulating the feel (and sometimes the look) of a conventional printed book, in order to provide a digital alternative format that is accessible to visually-impaired and print-disabled readers. This is where the "Digital Talking Books" legacy comes from.
Although this successful model is likely to remain a core value for some time, the 2010 revision of the DAISY standard will introduce new features (such as video and interactivity) that could reshape the accessible publishing landscape, and push DAISY further into mainstream applications.
Moving Forward
- Evolution - A good part of the ZedDist standardization effort consists in improving existing DAISY functionality. These multiple enhancements will mainly benefit the current DAISY ecosystem: automated production, interactive authoring, reading systems, online distribution, etc.
- Revolution - By contrast, some new features are being designed to directly benefit users outside of the existing DAISY community. For example, the introduction of interactivity and presentation state would create a shift in paradigm, a move into a more diversely accessible multimedia experience that would break free from the traditional book structure. This would give new classes of users an incentive to join the DAISY movement. More specifically, the introduction of video into the DAISY standard will provide deaf people with sign-language support. It will also enable rich structural and semantic integration of motion pictures within instructional material: interactive textbooks, disaster preparedness / emergency training using visual languages, AIDS prevention in Africa where transmission of local knowledge doesn't necessarily rely on written scripts, etc.
Inclusive Design
- Idealism - The goal of this planned technological transition is to bridge the divide between people of various abilities. By unifying information access modalities into a single publication method (which is sometimes referred-to as "Universal" Design), we can avoid fragmenting the user base and we can therefore bring forces together.
- Pragmatism - There are limitations to this approach, as no technology is likely to become a "one size fits all" solution (or "jack of all trades"). The DAISY standard owes its success partly to the fact that it is a well-scoped (i.e. specialized) format, with well-defined market perspectives and relatively low deployment costs. In practice, it is crucial to remain focused on simple and useful use-cases, to avoid the pitfalls of genericity.
Real World Adoption
The technical overhead associated with video is high. Why would DAISY multimedia appeal more than mainstream solutions such as the existing mashup of web technologies ? DAISY+video must offer a superior value proposition in order to be a preferred format in the publishing industry.
The standard needs to provide a baseline feature-set that is rich enough to compete with other multimedia integration platforms (e.g. Flash, HTML5, Silverlight), but also simple enough to minimize the learning curve, to encourage adoption, and of course to keep implementation costs down.
A key strategy to realize this vision is to encompass a set of qualities that makes DAISY the best choice for accessible publishing: openness, scope/simplicity, well-defined container, navigability, searchability, indexability, friendly-ness with content protection schemes, ability to integrate with online content delivery systems (distributed infrastructures, YouTube), etc.
Although the focus of ZedDist/video-in-DAISY is to specify a distribution format, it is important to design DAISY-next as an end-to-end solution that is the best choice for accessible publishing.
Collaborative Process
Whilst the video-enabled standard should effectively address immediate needs, it should also offer long-term implementation perspectives in the publishing industry. To achieve this, the working group must acquire some insight about the realities of multimedia production outside of the DAISY Consortium, by outreaching to communities that can provide real-world expertise in various domains (e.g. video captioning, deaf users and sign-language, disaster preparedness). This concerted effort with external partners should be sustained until the final specification is delivered. The video-in-DAISY working group should contain both specialists and stake-holders.
The DAISY Consortium must develop proof of concept and reference implementations as early as possible (i.e. Urakawa SDK, Tobi, AMIS, Pipeline, etc.). By "eating our own dog food", we demonstrate implementability and we showcase the technology to potential adopters. Ideally, this implementation effort should be a concerted one too, including developers from outside the core DAISY team.
