Thursday May 29, 2008

OpenOffice.org plug-in for creation of DAISY books

When we formed the OASIS OpenDocument Format Accessibility Subcommittee and reviewed ODF v1.0 for accessibility concerns, one of the things we thought about was the creation of DAISY books - the suitability of ODF to be the source format for digital talking books for people with print impairments. While most of the 9 recommendations we made for accessibility improvements (all incorporated into ODF v1.1) were of use to DAISY book creation, there was one in particular that had no other purpose save for DAISY: noting the page number whenever pagination occurs (whether or not a visible page number is displayed in the document) so that DAISY book users in a setting with users of printed books could know the printed book page number.

While the OASIS OpenDocument Format Accessibility Subcommittee concerns itself only with file format issues, we all of us on the subcommittee recognize how important it is that applications make use of the accessibility features in ODF (else they would be only of academic interest). To that end we published the OASIS ODF Accessibility Guidelines. Also to that end, one of the subcommittee members (Dave Pawson, then of the Royal National Institute of the Blind) contributed code to the DAISY Pipeline project back in April 2007 to support ODF as a source for DAISY books.

Today I'm delighted to report on the early availability of an ODT to DAISY DTBook plugin to OpenOffice.org (one of the over 100 extensions now available for OpenOffice.org). This open source project - using the GPL v3 license - is a cross-platform extension to OpenOffice.org written in Java that generates DAISY DTBook XML files - the penultimate stage in the DAISY process toward creating a (talking) DAISY book. While only at "version 0.0.4", it already supports an impressive list of tags, and includes a rich set of example documents illustrating a wide range of document scenarios (including addresses, lists, tables, nested tables, and mathematics). This OpenOffice.org extension is being developed by Computer Science Masters student Vincent Spiewak and his professor Dominique Archambault of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. It has just been featured in the May issue of The DAISY Planet, and since it was made available 6 days ago, has been download more than 150 times. (2008-05-29 16:57:52.0) Permalink