Alternate India Time Zone Meeting - Minutes cum Summary of discussions

*Alternate India Time Zone Meeting - Minutes cum Summary of discussions*

*When:*
Date: 14th August 2015
Time: IST 14:30-15:30 OR GMT 9:00-10:00

*Attended by:*
Mr. Avneesh Singh    Daisy Consortium
Mr. Rajesh Ranjan    Individual
Mr. Shwetank Dixit    Opera Software
Mr. Satya Pal    Wolters Kluwer
Mr. Chandrakant D.    C-DAC GIST
Mr. Dipendra Manocha    Daisy Consortium
Mr. Karunakar    Avaya Indlinux
Mr. Ravi Ratlami    Individual
Mr. Akshat Joshi    C-DAC GIST
Mr. Nishit Jain    C-DAC GIST
Ms. Neha Gupta    C-DAC GIST
Mr. Asok Bandyopadhyaya    C-DAC Kolkata
Ms. Barnali Pal    C-DAC Kolkata
Mr. Abhijeet Chatterjee C-DAC Kolkata
Mr. Ravi Kant    CSDS
Ms. Aditi Maheshwari    Vani Prakashan*

Summary of discussions:*
The first face-to-face call of the "Alternate India Time Zone" group 
took place on 14th Aug. 2015. The call had participation from a many 
different organizations involved in the entire Digital Publishing 
ecosystem, in different roles. There were participants on the call from 
Daisy Consortium, Opera Inc, C-DAC Pune, C-DAC Kolkata and of course 
Publishing houses.

The meeting began with the address by Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni (W3C India - 
Country Manager and HoD GIST, C-DAC). He welcomed all the participants 
and explained the background behind formation of this group. The main 
motive being, creating a platform for Digital Publishing community in 
Indian subcontinental region for discussing various nuances and needs of 
the region from the evolving global standard. This was followed by a 
round of introductions by all the participants.

After the round of introductions, Mr. Kulkarni introduced Mr. Rajesh 
Ranjan as the convener of the group. Mr. Kulkarni, also informed the 
participants that Mr. Ranjan would be the nodal person who wiil be 
acting as the bridge between the Global DPuB group and this group. He 
said that from next meetings onwards, one of the agenda points would be 
a briefing from Mr. Ranjan about the current discussions at the Global 
DPuB group. Mr. Kulkarni also thanked W3C for formation of this 
particular group. He also asked participants to communicate their 
concerns and opinions freely on this forum.

Mr. Ranjan then addressed the participants. Mr. Ranjan brought the 
attention of the participants to the Documents earlier shared on the 
mailing list, talking about the "Requirements for the latin text layout" 
and the "E-PUB WEB", to act as the base documents on which we can base 
our discussions.

The floor was then open for discussions. Mr. Avneesh Singh (Daisy 
Consortium) stressed on the need of focus on HTML 5, and CSS 3 
specifications as well along-with the Digital Publishing when we are 
looking from the point of view of Indian languages. He also talked about 
the need for E-pub to be adopted by the publishers as opposed to 
traditional "PDF Publishing". He also talked about Accessibility being 
much more that Text to Speech systems as it also includes formatting the 
documents in the right perspective for enabling various reading systems 
to handle them from Accessibility point of view. Mr. Shwetank (Opera 
Inc) pointed that when we look at the lack of support about Indian 
languages on browsers, sometimes it depends on the flaw in the Standard 
itself instead of a particular implementation. He also expressed his 
support for E-Pub. Mr. Dipendra Manocha (Daisy Consortium) also 
expressed the need for compliance with the standards. He also brought to 
the notice of the group, the "Epub-check" mechanism. In the discussion 
about compliance testing, he also mentioned about epubtest.org.

The future call timing and frequency were then discussed. It was decided 
to have a doodle poll for the same.

-- 
Regards,
Akshat Joshi
C-DAC GIST


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