Enabling Technologies Framework

Authors: Mark Bide, George Kerscher, Richard Orme, and Alicia Wise

Last revised: October 7, 2009

Project Overview

The Enabling Technologies Framework is a three year project funded by WIPO and endorsed by the Stakeholders Platform of WIPO. The project will be jointly run by two international standards bodies: DAISY consortium (http://www.daisy.org/) and EDItEUR (http://www.editeur.org/).

The goal of the project is to evolve mainstream publishing processes so that they are capable of delivering digital publications that are fully accessible. If engineered properly, publishing processes should be able to yield digital products that can be used effectively by every member of society. Some value may need to be added to support particular user groups, for example description of graphical elements for the blind. However, the fundamental usability of digital publications should equally meet the needs of both mainstream users and persons with disabilities; our target is to allow the same product to be used by everybody.

The focus of work will be to develop best practice guidelines for publishers to follow in their production process and where appropriate to integrate existing standards (e.g. ONIX, EPUB and DAISY) into mainstream publishing in ways that enhance these best practices. The outputs will be designed to be used by publishers in all parts of the world.

The Project Team

Both DAISY and EDItEUR are international organizations with excellent links in a wide range of countries with different languages, different socioeconomic conditions, and different publishing capacities and capabilities. They provide an extensive network of international contacts in the accessibility and publishing communities, and expert staff with proficiency in multiple languages.

The DAISY consortium has 17 full members, more than 55 associate members, and more than 20 friends from an array of countries. Full and associate members are generally non-profit organisations, typically national talking book libraries or national consortia of such libraries. Friends are for-profit organisations including developers of production and/or playback hardware or software. The DAISY Consortium is managed by a Board made up of representatives from all full member organizations. The consortium is constituted as a not-for-profit association under Swiss law and is governed by Articles of Association. In addition, there are several members of staff of the DAISY Consortium. They bring an international approach and multi-disciplinary and multi-linguistic backgrounds to their work on behalf of the organisation.

EDItEUR is the international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book and serials industries. It is a not-for-profit company established under UK law, managed by an international Board and Management Committee. It has three members of staff. EDItEUR has 90 members from 17 countries including Australia, Canada, Japan, South Africa, USA, and most European countries. It draws its membership from the entire publishing supply chain: publishers, wholesalers and library suppliers, retailers, libraries, and system suppliers. EDItEUR also provides the secretariat for the International Standard Book Numbering Agency (coordinating the assignment of ISBNs worldwide) and in this role works closely with 170 national ISBN agencies all over the world (see http://www.isbn-international.org/en/agencies.html for a complete listing).

Project team members, and their roles, are:

• Mark Bide (EDItEUR) – lead responsibility for communication and international liaison with the publishing industry
• Markus Gylling (DAISY) – lead responsibility for integration of ONIX and DAISY
• George Kerscher (DAISY) – lead responsibility for communication and international liaison with the accessibility community
• David Martin (EDItEUR) – lead responsibility for gathering requirements and all development necessary for ONIX extension, support responsibility for integration of ONIX and DAISY
• Dipendra Manocha (DAISY) – lead responsibility for training and multilingual support
• Romain Deltour (DAISY) – lead responsibility for DAISY pipeline extension
• New Recruit (2-3 days/week based in EDItEUR; a person with 5+ years’ experience working in a publishing production department and preferably someone with multiple languages) – lead in writing business case, best practice guidelines, and creating case studies. Shared responsibility for training.

Activities, Tasks, and Milestones

There are five work packages in total, covering project management, developing best practice guidelines, extending ONIX to convey accessibility information and integrating ONIX with DAISY and .ePub standards as appropriate, extending the DAISY pipeline to support publishers’ requirements and conversion house requirements, and the key deliverable package covering communications and training and technical support. Each of these work packages is described in a bit more detail below.

1. Project management

Year One Tasks

• Recruit or release appropriate resources to the project
• Establish project steering committee
• Develop detailed project plan
• Monthly team meetings via telephone with minutes circulated to the Stakeholders Platform to provide a regular update.
• Twice yearly formal reports to the Stakeholders Platform
• Annual report which will cover the status of DAISY-accessible .ePUB adoption, and progress as it applies to the Trusted Intermediaries network.

Year Two & Three Tasks

•  Maintain project management and governance processes

2. Developing Best Practice in Publishing Production Departments

Year One Tasks

• Identify and document the requirements for the creation of digital files in the publishing production process that are appropriate for the creation of accessible versions
• Gain a clear understanding of workflows and barriers to producing accessible versions.
• Develop best practice guidelines that enable publishers to meet these requirements by evolving their normal production workflows

Year Two & Three Tasks

• Document tools and services available for implementing the guidelines
• Produce case studies of successful implementation of the guidelines
• Review and revise guidelines based on experience and feedback

3. Extending ONIX to convey accessibility information and integrating ONIX with DAISY format

Year One Tasks

• Explore requirements for extensions to ONIX formats to meet requirements of communicating about accessible formats
• Extend ONIX formats to meet these requirements
• Explore requirements for and any technical or governance barriers to integration of ONIX formats with the revision of the DAISY standard.
• Explore requirements for and any technical or governance barriers to integration of ONIX formats with EPUB.

Year Two & Three Tasks

• Integrate ONIX formats with the DAISY standard as appropriate
• Integrate ONIX formats with the EPUB standard as appropriate

4. Extending the DAISY pipeline to support publishers’ requirements and conversion house requirements

Year One Tasks

• Pipeline 2 complete the concept proposal (see http://www.daisy.org/projects/pipeline/pipeline2.php)
• Gather functional requirements from publishing community
• Architectural design
• Gain support from specific companies to inform development and then implement
• First iteration launched

Year Two & Three Tasks

• Promote the DAISY pipeline as one way of implementing the best practice guidelines
• Identify specific input transforms required (e.g. .DocBook, InDesign, Quark)
• Support EPUB output
• Support DAISY output.
• Support community to build in/out transforms
• Iterative releases every six months

5. Communication, Training, and Technical Support

Year One Tasks

• Produce and publish a high-level business case for accessible publishing
• Set up discussion forum to facilitate dialogue between the international accessibility and publishing communities
• Press release launching forum and business case
• Gather publisher feedback on established production processes to inform the development of guidelines and tools
• Identify international training partners (e.g. Trade Associations, RROs)
• Develop marketing plan for promotion of accessible publishing and of project outputs
• Plan international train-the-trainer programmes
• Develop training materials

Year Two & Three Tasks

• Promote implementation of the guidelines and tools via train-the-trainer programmes
• Deliver case studies, promotional materials and/or presentations via WIPO and partner websites who have a presence at international book fairs (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Bologna, BookExpo America, BookExpo Canada, Cape Town, Frankfurt, Guadalajara, Jerusalem, London, New Delhi, and Salon du Livre)
• Maintain discussion forum
• Develop webinar series project plans
• Create webinar presentations
• Launch webinar series
• Evaluate effectiveness of guidelines and tools

Budget

 

Annex – Project Team Biographies

Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR
Mark Bide is Executive Director of EDItEUR, the global trade standards organization responsible for the maintenance and publication of ONIX for Books. He is also the Project Director for the ACAP Project, and a Director of Rightscom, the specialist media consultancy. Mark has worked in and around the publishing industry for nearly 40 years, having been a Director of the European subsidiaries of both CBS Publishing and John Wiley & Sons. He is a Visiting Professor of the University of the Arts London

Romain Deltour, Software Developer and Systems Architect, DAISY Consortium
Romain Deltour is a French computer scientist with expertise in user interfaces, web and XML technologies. He was in charge of the development of multimedia authoring tools for INRIA, an authoring tool for W3C SMIL documents, and developed LimSee3 which is a template-based solution for flexible multimedia authoring. While at INFRIA he worked with members of the DAISY Consortium on the Urakawa project which aimed at providing a multimedia authoring toolkit for designing accessible content to persons with disabilities.

Markus Gylling, International Technical Development Director, DAISY
Markus Gylling is seconded part-time to the DAISY Consortium from his job at the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille

David Martin, ONIX Support Team, EDItEUR
David Martin is an independent consultant on standards for business communication in the book trade, working principally for EDItEUR, where he leads the team responsible for ONIX for Books. David has been involved with metadata standards for most of his career, at INSPEC, at the British Library where he was Director of Automated Services for six years, and as a founder Director of Book Data Ltd (now part of Nielsen BookData).

Dipendra Manocha, Developing Countries Director, DAISY
Dipendra Manocha is Director of the Regional Resource Centre of DAISY for All in New Delhi. Blind since childhood, Dipendra Manocha has used technology to build a communications and training infrastructure that enables the disabled to put their abilities to work alongside other citizens in mainstream society.

Dr George Kerscher, Secretary General, DAISY Consortium
George Kerscher began innovating with information technology in 1987, and coined the term "print disabled”. As Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and Senior Officer of Accessible Technology at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic in the USA, Kerscher is a recognized leader in document access. In addition, Kerscher chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee, chairs the W3C's Steering Council for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), chairs the maintenance committee for EPUB, and serves on the IDPF and NIMAS Boards.