Category: Standards / Guidelines

NISO and DAISY Consortium Publish Authoring and Interchange Framework Standard

(The following news was received from Annette Reilly, STC Fellow and Standards Council Chair, Society for Technical Communication.)

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the DAISY Consortium announce the publication of the new American National Standard Authoring and Interchange Framework (ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012). The standard defines how to represent digital information using XML to produce documents suitable for transformation into different universally accessible formats. The standard is a revision, extension, and enhancement of Specifications for the Digital Talking Book (DTB), commonly referred to as the DAISY standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012)). The DAISY Consortium is the Maintenance Agency for both standards.

“The A&I Framework is a modular, extensible architecture to permit the creation of any number of content representation models, each custom-tailored for a particular kind of information resource,” states Markus Gylling, Chief Technology Officer at the DAISY Consortium and Technical Chair of the DAISY Revision Working Group. “It also provides support for new output formats, which can be added and implemented as the need arises. The standard does not impose limitations on what distribution formats can be created from it; e-text, Braille, large print, and EPUB are among formats that can be produced in conformance with the standard.”

“Organizations in the DAISY community and in the mainstream of publishing have been looking for an XML framework that is power ful and flexible,” states George Kerscher, Secretary General for the DAISY Consortium and Administrative Chair of the DAISY Revision Working Group. “The Authoring and Interchange Framework not only meets this need, it expands the possibility of what can be produced for the existing community of users of DAISY books and also enlarges the potential audience of both developers and users of resources that conform to this standard. New applications using this standard could include electronic magazines as well as digital books, text to speech rendering for e-readers, and multimedia publications.”

“Although the new A&I Framework standard is intended to replace the Digital Talking Book standard,” explains Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, “feedback during trial use of the standard indicated that content providers and device manufacturers would need a tran sition period of several years due to the significance of the changes in the standard. To meet this need, the existing DTB standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.86) was reaffirmed for another five years and the A&I Framework was assigned a new standard number (ANSI/NISO Z39.98).”

The A&I Framework standard will be of interest to any organization using an XML authoring workflow, developers and publishers of universally accessible digital publications, and agencies interested in creating profiles for new document types to integrate into distribution formats, such as EPUB.

Both the A&I Framework standard and the Digital Talking Book standard are available for free download from the NISO website and the DAISY website.

Participate in the face-to-face meeting of the W3C WAI EOWG

Message received from Shawn Henry

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) will be meeting face-to-face on 1-2 November 2010 in Lyon, France. We plan to work on enhancing functionality of “How to Meet WCAG 2.0″, redesigning the WAI website, expanding training materials, and updating evaluation resources, as listed at http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/2010/11f2f#read If you are interested in participating in EOWG, coming to this face-to-face meeting would be a good opportunity to learn more about the group. If you might want to attend, please give me a call at +1-617-395-7664 or e-mail email hidden; JavaScript is required *by Wednesday 20 October*.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) welcomes participation from individuals and organizations to help make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities. WAI’s Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) is looking for participants from industry, disability organizations, accessibility research, government, and others interested in Web accessibility. We are specifically looking for web accessibility advocates, developers, trainers, educators, evaluators, researchers, and editors to help EOWG with:
* copyediting
* drafting documents and incorporating group feedback, as a lead editor
* user interface / user interaction design
* CSS, javascript, and other development
* wiki editing
* print design
* testing with assistive technologies and adaptive strategies

You can work with WAI education and outreach through:

1. Joining the EOWG mailing list and commenting on documents in development.
To sign up for the EOWG mailing list, follow the instructions at http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/participation.html#mail

2. Joining as an active participant in the Working Group by committing 4 or more hours per week to EOWG work.
If you are considering this option, please read the information at http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/participation.html#participant and contact me to schedule a time to discuss your possible participation.

For more information on Participating in WAI generally, including a list of other Working Groups, please see http://www.w3.org/WAI/participation

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
~Shawn Henry, EOWG Chair

—–
Shawn Lawton Henry
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
e-mail: email hidden; JavaScript is required
phone: +1.617.395.7664
about: http://www.w3.org/People/Shawn/

IEC Offers Free Technical Report on Accessibility for Multimedia Systems and Equipment

New York October 11, 2010

Update: Tagged version of the PDF is available from the STC AccessAbility blog at IEC Technical Report 62678 tagged for accessibility. Kindly tagged by Mike Paciello, Founder & Principal, TPG, email hidden; JavaScript is required

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is offering free downloads of a Technical Report (TR) on audio, video, and multimedia systems and equipment activities and considerations related to accessibility and usability.

The TR is being offered in cooperation with this year’s theme for World Standards Day: accessibility for all. Around the world, nations celebrating World Standards Day 2010 recognized the critical role of model codes, standards, and conformity assessment activities in developing and maintaining the built environment, products, technologies, and systems that are accessible for persons with special needs.

IEC/TR 62678, Audio, video, and multimedia systems and equipment activities and considerations related to accessibility and usability, provides information on accessibility and usability terms, activities, completed and ongoing standards, technical reports, and projects, and specifies user needs that may or may not apply to audio, video, and multimedia systems and equipment.

It also contains a user-friendly checklist of accessibility and usability considerations. The information provided in the TR may be applied by industry experts who are evaluating opportunities to integrate support for accessibility and usability.

Download the free technical report:
http://www.iec.ch/news_centre/special_events/wsd/pdf_pub/iec62678%7Bed1.0%7Den.pdf (.pdf)

Annette Reilly
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC7 US TAG Chair
301-548-2121
fax 301-721-5696
cell 240-888-4348
email hidden; JavaScript is required
email hidden; JavaScript is required

The ATAG 2.0 Working Draft Call for Review

The call for review of the working draft of ATAG 2.0 – the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines – is now open. You can submit your comments until June 11.

What needs to be reviewed?

This 2.0 working draft of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) published 21 May 2009.

How to review ATAG 2.0

If you accept this mission, uh, if you answer this call for review, note that specific changes and questions for feedback are listed in the Status section.

Please send your comments to the publicly archived list at email hidden; JavaScript is required by 11 June 2009. If you are a technical communicator responding to this call, we hope you will do this profession proud. :)

What is ATAG?

You can read about ATAG on the ATAG overview page. To quote from that page:

Authoring tools are software and services that people use to produce Web pages and Web content. [...] The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) documents define how authoring tools should help Web developers produce Web content that is accessible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The ATAG documents also explain how to make authoring tools accessible so that people with disabilities can use the tools.

Additional resources you may enjoy include

This call for review was published on the WAI Interest Group mailing list and was an inspiration for this blog post.